Collingwood – Re-enactment

Robin G. Collingwood, a British archeologist and philosopher, elaborated on the so-called notion of re-enactment. In his main theoretical work, the Idea of History, published posthumously, the editor placed an argument in the “Epilogue” in which Collingwood detailed this concept. `The truly historicist epistemological idea of re-enactment was closely connected to another one of his arguments concerning the epistemological importance of the question and answer. According to the latter, when a historian tries to find out the precise meaning of a textual testimony coming from the past, he/she must also know the question to which the historical actor addressed his/her response, and what it meant, as they are correlative. Collingwood’s historical epistemology, an extreme version of historicism, generated contrasting reactions: several theoreticians (e.g. W. H. Dray) and historians (e.g. Q. Skinner) adopt it unreservedly; there are, however, thinkers, like H. G. Gadamer in particular, who in the name of philosophical hermeneutics, reject it altogether.