Collingwood and the Continent

Intellectually isolated at the University of Oxford, Robin George Collingwood liked his intellectual influences to come from a different time and place.¹ ‘Multilingual, polymathic, hydratalented and omniskilled’, writes the philosopher of mind, Colin McGinn, ‘he did not want to be tied down to one way of looking at things. In particular, he did not want to be confined to the present: historical knowledge had to be integral to philosophy, as it was for Hegel.’² In spite of his reluctance, ‘in accordance with a method of writing which I inherit from a long line of English philosophers’, to credit his influences