ABSTRACT
R. G. Collingwood, like Kant, considered attempts by metaphysical arguments to reach what lies beyond experience as doomed to futility. 1 His own countersuggestion, in his Essay on Metaphysics, was that metaphysics is ‘the attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been made by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that occasion or group of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking’. 2 As such, ‘All metaphysical questions are,’ he said, ‘historical questions, and all metaphysical propositions are historical propositions.’ 3
