The project included a research stay in Oxford for the study of unpublished material in the Collingwood Archives at the Weston (Bodleian) Library. The focus was on Collingwood’s views on logic and philosophical realism. A further visit was paid to Peter Winch Archive at King’s College, London, focusing on Winch’s relation to Collingwood and on his views on logic. It included an effort to identify unpublished but publishable material by Winch. The investigator forwarded his views on this to the present editors on Winch’s posthumous works.
One could see that Winch read Collingwood carefully, and that the parallelism between Winch and Collingwood was closer than Winch could have been aware of at the time he published his own works. This was especially visible in their approaches to logic (logic as the study of the conditions of meaningful reasoning, as opposed to logic as a formal system of rules of syntax) and their approach to realism (philosophy as the study of thinking, rather than outlining what exists in the world). While Collingwood mainly looked at logic in the context of the production of historical and scientific knowledge, Winch emphsised its ethical aspects.
In a separate but related case study, the Investigator has studied the paradigm shift in social anthropology in the interwar period, using manuscript material by the anthropologists Edward Westermarck and Bronislaw Malinowski. This work throws new light on how the theoretical framework in anthropology shifted away from a general study of human cultural evolution, towards the functional study of specific cultures. The friendship and intellectual exchange between Westermarck and Malinowski was an important contributing factor. This is an example of the kind of paradigm shift that Collingwood and Winch hoped would take place generally in the human sciences.
The overall project has resulted in two peer-reviewed articles published in 2022, two peer-reviewed articles published in 2023, one accepted for publication and two submitted for peer review. Two non-peer-reviewed scholarly articles have been published within the project in 2022, and two have been accepted for publication in 2022 or 2023. We submitted our book proposal for review in November 2022. The book manuscript will be finalised after the end of the project period, recisely as planned in the project proposal.
By way of dissemination of research results in wider society, the project included three blog posts and two podcasts. The Investigator has presented the research project to a group of upper secondary school students. He has given two public lectures, one for a Finnish civic organisation (available on-line) and one for faculty members and students at the University of Pardubice.
In september 2022, a workshop on idealism and realism in the human sciences was organised in Pardubice within the project, with invited representatives from philosophy and social science.
