An Inquiry Into R. G. Collingwood’s Critique Of Historical Reason

General speaking, from Voltaire to the present, we add a lot of qualifiers before the term "philosophy of history", such as Speculative Philosophy of History, Critical Philosophy of History, Analytical Philosophy of History and Narrativist Philosophy of History. The first two forms of the philosophy of history is mainly concentrated in the European continent, the speculative philosophy of history often point to Vico, Voltaire, Hegel, they write "universal history", trying to tally up the universal principles of the course of history; Critical philosophy of history usually stand for the new Kantian school, they focus on the "Epistemology", in an attempt to distinguish the similarities and differences between natural science and historical science. The latter two forms of the philosophy of history is mainly concentrated in the English-speaking world, the analytical philosophy of history focuses on the analysis of the nature of historical knowledge, mainly represented by Hempel, Walsh, Dray; Narrativist philosophy of history is trying to reveal the structure of historical narrative and historical representation, and proclaim the aesthetic and moral aspirations shaded by the rationalist discourse, with strongly anti-Enlightenment spirit of the Enlightenment, which is mainly represented by Hayden White, Ankersmit.Throughout the philosophy of history in these forms, they tend to shorten the time span, the speculative philosophy of history spanning a century, and then the three together only a century. The second is the increasingly close links with the historical practice, either as a branch of philosophy (philosophy of history), or as a branch of history (theory of history). Third, they have distinctive philosophy characteristics. Thus, the return to the general form of the philosophy, the ancient philosophy of the main problems is the answer to what the world is? It is ontological research; Since the Epistemology Turn, philosophy tries to analyze the ability of our own understanding of the world to answer the question of the ancients; After the beginning of the 20th century, the philosophy of language outshine, when people realize that we’re talking about what the world is, we are always talking about the language. If the removal of the philosophy of language aside, we can have summed up the two basic problems of the philosophy of history:the metaphysics of history and the epistemology of history.This dissertation mainly discusses Collingwood’s philosophy of history. We are tring to re-explore the connotation of Collingwood’s philosophy of history based on the Western Collingwood researches since World War Ⅱ and the dilemma of the current narrativist philosophy of history. After the intensive analysis of his Lectures on the philosophy of history (1926-28), we can conclude that Collingwood tried to distinguish the metaphysics of history and the epistemology of history, but he did not separate the two problems like the analytical philosophy of history, in that he explore the Epistemological questions about history is to solve the traditionally Metaphysical questions about history, which is to complete the "Critique of Historical Reason" on the Kant’s way.Once we demonstrate the universality and inevitability of Historical Reason, the differences in all disciplines are gone, and the scaffolding will be automatically removed.