Speculum Mentis

Collingwood is a writer of great elegance, and I award five stars for this lovely essay on the nature of knowledge. This book was the stimulus for Oakeshott's first masterpiece. The book is written with a moral urgency speaking to the crisis Collingwood perceived in the failure of thought to be integrated in modernity. The solution is Hegelian, finding in the self-contradiction of each separate form of thought (art, religion, history etc.) the keys to transcend those forms of thought and integrate the whole.There is a significant problem with the editing of this edition. The book has an unacceptably large number of editorial errors. These errors are mainly of the sort that seem to be created by computer character recognition. Clearly, this book has been edited; it is not mere publication of the raw OCR product. But the editing is not sufficiently rigorous. The number of semicolons and dashes obviously missing from the text is striking. There are also typos, though this is less common. My sense is that there is most paragraphs contain at least one error, and many two. It is certainly possible to read this book in this digital edition with pleasure, but the errors are annoying.

Interesting but a bit hard to put together, needs re reading.