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R. G. Collingwood, the British historian and philosopher, raised the following objections to the claim of his Oxford colleagues that philosophic texts are reducible to a series of ahistorical propositions. He first observed that truth and falsity do not belong to such propositions but rather to complexes of questions and answers. He next pointed out that an author's guiding question and its context may often be difficult to reconstruct. Encumbered by our own philosophic baggage, we bring questions to the reading of any text that may not coincide with the question that animated the author's reflections. Moreover, original thinkers often succeed in refining the sense of their questions only gradually in the process of reflecting upon them. Their most important contributions thus take the form of a retroactive realization that they or their traditions had been asking the wrong question. Collingwood offers as an example the radical transformation of the philosophy of nature brought about when the Pythagoreans first replaced the question asked by Thales and Anaximander, i.e., "What is the fundamental stuff of which things are made, and how do qualitative variations of this stuff (hot and cold, moist and dry) account for differences among things?" by the question: "What combinations of fundamental shapes or forms and what mathematical ratios among them account for the composition of various stuffs?"¹

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_12

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