The Idea of Nature

I am a fan of RG Collingwood, but this book was a pleasant surprise. Although relatively short and from the 1930s/40s it contained a very modern view of the changing understanding of nature from the ancient Greeks through to the 20th Century quantum and relativity revolutions.

A somewhat dated but still eminently readable and excellent book

Type too small to read easily. Too difficult to comprehend

R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) is perhaps best known for his aesthetics and for his distinctive approach to the philosophy of history. His interests and background ranged much more widely, and a consistent feature of his work is to clarify the relations between domains of thought held to be distinct, such as religion, art, history, science and philosophy. In this work, he aims to clarify the aims and scope of natural science, by examining the historical development of the idea of nature. He identifies three broad historical periods in which investigations into the natural world coincided with philosophical reflections on the methods and presuppositions of such investigations. Nature, he argues, was conceived along radically different lines in each of these periods, with the implication that natural science must be understood in light of and in relation to history.Perhaps this thought has become a commonplace since the appearance of Kuhn's  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , and given the rise of "History and Philosophy of Science" departments at major research universities around the world. It was a radical insight in Collingwood's time, when the positivist assumption that natural science and its results and proper methods are independent from history tended to dominate philosophy departments, even if it was at odds with what Collingwood took to be a growing recognition among some scientists that the natural world and its processes are themselves historical and evolving.In rough outline, Collingwood argues that the ancient Greeks conceived of nature along the lines of a living organism - or considered that the living organism was the paradigm of a natural thing. To understand Thales' proclamation that "all is water" requires that we not think of water as a dead, inert, material stuff, but as a kind of dynamic, self moving substance (or how else could we reconcile that claim with another famously cryptic claim by Thales that "all things are full of gods"?). He argues, by contrast, that the early modern or renaissance thinkers responsible for the "scientific revolution" conceived of nature mechanistically, as a kind of machine, an aggregate of parts that exert forces on other parts. Note that this is a radical shift: whereas for the Greeks (as Aristotle put it) things in nature are self moving, for the Renaissance thinkers nature is inert, which means it can't move itself but has to be pushed. To read Aristotle with a mechanistic conception in mind, is to radically misread him. The modern or twentieth century conception of nature, Collingwood argues, was pointing in a new direction, towards a conception of nature as an evolving historical system. Not only Darwin, but quantum mechanics and ecology can be thought of along these lines. To understand a natural system or process rightly according to these (then) new approaches is to recognize it as having come to be what it is as a result of an ongoing history of interactions with other systems or processes.Collingwood's study is obviously of historical interest, but also for its methodology, for exemplifying a rigorous philosophical approach to the history of ideas, and for its important implications regarding the relations between history, science and philosophy. Scientists, he argues, need to understand the methods and teachings of history as much as historians and philosophers need to be attentive to the results of natural science, which can only be understood properly in light of history.

The author died before the manuscript has been completely prepared for publication, so you will have to cope with some minor language deficiencies. However, although the book was mostly written in the 1930's, the abundance of original and unfortunately unnoticed important ideas just in the Introduction itself (the first 27 pages) will more than repay your efforts.To wet your appetite here are some fragments from the end of the Introduction.*****************************************************************************"If an historian had no more means of apprehending events that occupied more than an hour, he could describe the burning down of a house but not the building of a house; the assassination of Caesar but not his conquest of Gaul; ... the performance of a symphony but not its composition. If two historians gave each his own answer to the question: 'What kind of event happen, or can or might happen, in history?' their answers would be extremely different if one habitually thought of an event as something that takes an hour and the other as something that takes ten years; and a third who conceived an event as taking anything up to 1,000 years would give a different answer again.... In general, making things takes longer than destroying them. The shorter our standard time-phase for an historical event, the more our history will consist of destructions, catastrophes, battle, and sudden death. But destruction implies the existence of something to destroy; and as this type of history cannot describe how such a thing came into existence, for the process of its coming into existence was ... too long to be conceived ..., its existence must be presupposed as given, ready-made, miraculously established by some force outside history.... I have quoted late Mr. Sullivan's remark that the second law of thermodynamics applies only from the human point of view and would be unnecessary for an intelligent microbe. ... [A]n intelligent organism whose life had a [much] longer time-rhythm than man's might find it not so much unnecessary as untrue.The natural processes that come most easily within ordinary human observation, it may be, are predominantly of a destructive kind, like the historical events that come most easily within the knowledge of the historian who thinks of an event as something that takes a short time. Like such an historian, the natural scientist, it may be, is led by this fact to think of events in nature as in the main destructive: releases or dissipations of energy ...; to think of the natural world as running down like a clock or being shot away like a store of ammunition. ...May it not be the same in the world of nature? May it not be the case that the modern picture of a running-down universe, in which energy is by degrees exchanging a non-uniform and arbitrary distribution (that is, a distribution not accounted for by any laws yet known to us, and therefore in effect a given, ready-made, miraculously established distribution ...) for a uniform distribution, according to the second law of thermodynamics, is a picture based on habitual observation of relatively short-phase processes, and one destined to be dismissed as illusory at some future date, when closer attention has been paid to processes whose time-phase is longer? Or even if these long-phase processes should continue to elude human observation, may it not be found necessary to dismiss the same picture as illusory because, according to the principles of evolutionary physics, we shall find ourselves obliged to postulate such processes even though we cannot directly observe them?"

This is a delicious piece of scholarly writing. Collingwood discusses the way mankind's conception has changed over three period - the Classical, the Enlightenment and the post-Darwinian. The first two are, in my opinion, the strongest. Collingwood was writing a bit too early to really be able to get a long-view of the post-Darwinian period, which is still playing out.It is an easy read but addresses some really big questions.

Perfect for my course. knowledge of this guy is outstanding

It's a capsule for understanding the idea of Nature for the History students.

コリングウッドは、非常にユニークな歴史哲学者で須賀夭折したのですっぱんされた著書が少なく兎も角入手できて助かりました

Paid 1p for a used book and it looks absolutely new. Fantastic!