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This chapter explores a programme of archaeological research conducted from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the 1940s. This work explored the date of construction, identity, and signature of these frontier works, by addressing the location, form, and sequence of the individual features of the frontier. R. G. Collingwood, one of the most influential archaeologists involved in this work, defined ‘The period of scientific excavation’ in his important article ‘Hadrian's Wall: A History of the Problem’, arguing that it commenced in 1891 and lasted until his own time. The chapter examines Collingwood's claim that archaeological studies of the Wall had become more professional and scientific. It also considers the extent to which the great era of excavation resulted in a philosophy of thought that has damaged subsequent research on the Wall.

R. G. Collingwood defended a Romantic theory of art as the expression of emotion, which was so effectively criticized by the philosopher Alan Tormey in 1971 that Collingwood's theory was left for dead. This chapter rehabilitates Collingwood's views, not as a theory of art in general, but as a theory of expression in the arts. Collingwood's idea that the expression of emotion in literature, painting, and so on is the articulation and elucidation of emotion is clarified by reference to the theory of emotion worked out in Part One. Expression should be thought of as a special kind of cognitive monitoring and as part of the emotion process.

Offers some thoughts about the idea of trusteeship and its place in the history of international society. The first section, Unity, Progress, and Perfection of Humankind, puts forward the claim that trusteeship is a historic idea that is distinctive of a particular time and place, and, specifically, that it is intelligible in relation to other ideas that are especially characteristic of the Enlightenment. Thus, trusteeship discloses moral excellence, and indeed obtains powerful justification, when it contributes to the unity, progress, and perfection of the human family. The second section, A Society of States and a Family of Peoples, argues that these ideas call forth an understanding of international life that conceives international society and human society as forming a perfect identity, and which is underwritten by the duty that we should act so as to secure the good of our fellows. The third section, The Limit of Obligation, considers the limits of this duty, and concludes that in seeking the good of our fellows we must stop short of treating people paternally. This conclusion casts a pall of doubt on the legitimacy of trusteeship in contemporary international society, even when it is aimed at protecting fundamental human rights, because it proposes to treat an equal unequally—indeed, trusteeship is morally objectionable because it offends the irreducible sanctity of human personality by repudiating the essence of what it means to be human, a thinking and choosing agent.

This chapter explores the kind of nonreductivism defended by Davidson and compares it with that which predominated in mid-century. Davidson’s argument for the autonomy of the human sciences is contrasted with the one developed by R. G. Collingwood as presented through the interpretative efforts of W. H. Dray. It is argued here that Davidson’s arguments against the anticausalist consensus that dominated the first half of the twentieth century were not conclusive and that the success of causalism in the latter half of the century is largely due to a return of heavy-duty metaphysics and an ontological backlash against the linguistic turn. Davidson, however, was able to preserve a kind of nonreductivism that is grounded in a distinction in kind between normative and descriptive sciences, rather than in a distinction in degree between sciences with greater or lower predictive power.

Chapter One provides an ontology of design that distinguishes it from art and craft as a specific kind of object with unique characteristics. A critical engagement with traditional formalist and expression theories of art demonstrate that design cannot be theorized in the same manner as the fine arts, or craft. Design, instead, is primarily functional, meant to be used rather than contemplated, and is distinct from art in particular because of its lack of profundity and originality, or because of its familiarity and quiddity. The properties that characterize design as unique also indicate that it is a candidate for aesthetic appraisal that merits separate attention.

Taking up the topic of metaethics, this chapter explores one broad argument type of anti-realist character which has been popular among idealists, an argument type which holds that attributions of value must always be understood by reference to some idealized act of valuation from which they would result. Three forms of this argument type are considered, anchoring the value judgement alternatively in ideal love (Plato, Brentano), in ideal desire (T. H. Green), or in ideal choice (J. S. Mackenzie, R. G. Collingwood). Focusing in particular on the version which employs the notion of idealized desire, the chapter discusses both the stages involved in extrapolating to such a limit, and the various objections which might be made against the strategy.

The chapter describes how the project of Creatively Undecided evolved out of my earlier work. The works of George Peacock, William Whewell, John Herschel and W. R. Hamilton I studied during the 1990s ended up defying the marked Popperian and Collingwoodian perspective to which I was committed. The creative, yet painfully split hybridic accounts of science and mathematics they produced bespoke a profound normative inner struggle that challenged my philosophical commitments. Philosophical work on Popper’s identification of rationality and criticism alerted me to criticism’s inherent normative constraints, namely, that one could not criticize the norms employed in criticizing, which supposedly rendered them immune to critical reflection. The key was to realize that normative criticism from without could render one ambivalent to the norms it challenged, and hence susceptible to self-criticism. The chapter concludes with a brief description of the philosophical account of the transformative impact of such criticism presented in The View from Within of 2011, on which the present study builds.

Defining Romanization is problematical, not least because there was no uniform concept throughout the empire of what it meant to be ‘Roman’. Assessments from the early twentieth century, when the term was introduced, automatically included a value judgement that Romanization of native communities was a good thing, and something that they would have aspired to. This was based largely on the colonialist viewpoint of classical scholars of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras that presupposed that the imposition of ‘civilized’ standards on subject peoples was morally justified and practically beneficial. Changing attitudes have not only rendered this viewpoint unacceptable, but have also made debate itself unacceptable in some quarters. In reality interaction between native communities and the occupying regime was different in different parts of Britain, and the impact of occupation, in terms of urban development, for example, was extremely variable. For much of the twentieth century Romano-British archaeology was built upon the historically based legacy of Haverfield and Collingwood, in which military history formed the basic framework for research, but new approaches were triggered in the 1990s by advances in technology and development-funded archaeology. Recent research has argued that south-eastern Britain at least already included client kingdoms of Rome, though the case remains controversial.

In addition to his contributions to the history of philosophy, Bernard Williams’s later work is concerned with more explicit reflection on the role of history in the constitution of the discipline of philosophy, the fact that, unlike the case of the natural sciences, the great figures of philosophy are part of the contemporary discussion in philosophy. In addition these reflections became increasingly concerned with what is distinctive about history as a form of knowledge, a form of knowledge which does not attract the attention of analytic philosophers. Historical knowledge is at once empirical and evidence-based but also, insofar as it concerns human affairs and institutions, obliged to make sense of and reconstruct the perspective of the practices and participants themselves. Part of the importance of historical understanding for Williams lies in its position as a model for humanistic knowledge that is non-reductionist while also being non-ideal, empirical, and “impure.”

“This View of Life,” Stephen Jay Gould’s long-running essay series, forms a massive refutation of any charge that in popularized science truth and entertainment are incompatible. These essays invariably “follow two unbreakable rules,” Gould writes: “I never lie and I strive mightily not to bore you.” In the prologue to the collection Bully for Brontosaurus, Gould is more explicit concerning his first rule: “No compromises with conceptual richness; no bypassing of ambiguity or ignorance; removal of jargon, of course, but no dumbing down of ideas (any conceptual complexity can be conveyed in English).” Concerning the second rule, Gould is silent: he practices but does not reflect on his ability to shock us, to imitate in prose the last line of Muir’s “The Animals.” On the surface, a statement of biblical fact, its position at the poem’s end belies its factual status. We experience instead the shock of our existential state, burdened by history, by memory, by the apprehension of death. Muir has sprung a surprise, giv-ing us an experience Longinus long ago described, the literary sublime. By literary means as well, in his essays on science and its history, Gould can spring analogous surprises. In Gould, however, the literary sublime is always in the service of its scientific counterpart. I single out a group among his three hundred essays, each of which is so structured that we vicariously experience the process of discovery. Their twists and turns seem at first to lead nowhere; no picture emerges until, suddenly, one does, a surprise that evokes the experience of the scientific sublime. A very young Adam Smith—an Adam Smith well before The Wealth of Nations—tells us how us how surprise opens a path to this sublime: “When one accustomed object appears after another, which it does not usually follow, it first excites, by its unexpectedness, the sentiment properly called surprise, and afterwards, by the singularity of the succession, or order of its appearance, the sentiment properly called wonder.”