Robin George Collingwood
Born	22 February 1889 (1889-02-22) Gillhead, Cartmel Fell, Lancashire
Died	9 January 1943(1943-01-09) (aged 53) Coniston, Lancashire
Occupation	Philosopher and historian

Robin George Collingwood (22 February 1889 – 9 January 1943) was a British philosopher and historian. He was born at Cartmel, Grange-over-Sands in Lancashire, the son of the academic W. G. Collingwood, and was educated at Rugby School and at University College, Oxford, where he read Greats. He graduated with congratulatory first class honours and, prior to his graduation, was elected a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.

Biography[link]

Collingwood was a fellow of Pembroke, Oxford for some 15 years until becoming the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was the only pupil of F. J. Haverfield to survive World War I.^[1] Important influences on Collingwood were the Italian Idealists Croce, Gentile and Guido de Ruggiero, the last of whom was also a close friend. Other important influences were Hegel, Kant, Vico, F. H. Bradley and J. A. Smith. His father W. G. Collingwood, professor of fine art at University College, Reading, was a student of Ruskin and was also an important influence.

Collingwood is most famous for his book The Idea of History, a work collated from various sources soon after his death by his pupil, T. M. Knox. The book came to be a major inspiration for philosophy of history in the English-speaking world. It is extensively cited, leading one commentator to ironically remark that Collingwood is coming to be "the best known neglected thinker of our time".^[2] Not just a philosopher of history, Collingwood was also a practicing historian and archaeologist, being during his time a leading authority on Roman Britain.

Collingwood held history as "recollection" of the "thinking" of a historical personage. Collingwood considered whether two different people can have the same thought and not just the same content, concluding that "there is no tenable theory of personal identity" preventing such a doctrine.

In The Principles of Art Collingwood held (following Croce) that works of art are essentially expressions of emotion. He portrayed art as a necessary function of the human mind, and considered it collaborative activity. In politics Collingwood defended the ideals of what he called liberalism "in its Continental sense":

The essence of this conception is ... the idea of a community as governing itself by fostering the free expression of all political opinions that take shape within it, and finding some means of reducing this multiplicity of opinions to a unity.^[3]

He also published The First Mate's Log (1940), an account of a yachting voyage in the Mediterranean, in the company of several of his students.

Arthur Ransome was a family friend, and learned to sail in their boat, subsequently teaching his sibling's children to sail. Ransome loosely based the Swallows in Swallows and Amazons series on his sibling's children. Ransome also proposed to two of his three sisters.

After several years of increasingly debilitating strokes Collingwood died at Coniston, Lancashire in January 1943. He was a practising Anglican throughout his life.

Main works published in his lifetime[link]

• Religion and Philosophy (1916) ISBN 1-85506-317-4
• Roman Britain (1923, ed. 2, 1932) ISBN 0-8196-1160-3
• Speculum Mentis; or The Map of Knowledge (1924) ISBN 978-1-897406-42-7
• Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (1925)
• The Archaeology of Roman Britain (1930) ISBN 978-0-09-185045-6
• An Essay on Philosophic Method (1933, rev. ed. 2005). ISBN 1-85506-392-1
• Roman Britain and the English Settlements (with J. N. L. Myres, 1936, second edition 1937)
• The Principles of Art (1938) ISBN 0-19-500209-1
• An Autobiography (1939) ISBN 0-19-824694-3
• The First Mate's Log (1940)
• An Essay on Metaphysics (1940, revised edition 1998). ISBN 0-8191-3315-9
• The New Leviathan (1942, rev. ed. 1992) ISBN 0-19-823880-0

Posthumously-published works[link]

• The Idea of Nature (1945) ISBN 0-19-500217-2
• The Idea of History (1946, revised edition 1993). ISBN 0-19-285306-6
• Essays in the Philosophy of Art (1964)
• Essays in the Philosophy of History (1965) ISBN 0-8240-6355-4
• Essays in Political Philosophy (1989) ISBN 0-19-823566-6
• The Principles of History and Other Writings in Philosophy of History (2001) ISBN 0-19-924315-8
• The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology (2005) ISBN 0-19-926253-5

All 'revised' editions comprise the original text plus a new introduction and extensive additional material.

References[link]

1. ^ British Idealism and Collingwood Centre accessed 6 November 2011
2. ^ Mink, Louis O. (1969). Mind, History, and Dialectic. Indiana University Press, 1.
3. ^ R. G. Collingwood (2005). "Man Goes Mad" in The Philosophy of Enchantment. Oxford University Press, 318.

External links[link]

• Additional Articles and Documents by R. G. Collingwood
• Robin George Collingwood entry by Giuseppina D'Oro in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Collingwood's Aesthetics entry by Gary Kemp in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Voice in the wilderness: RG Collingwood radio discussion from Australian Broadcasting Corporation
• Robin Collingwood: Archaeologist of Roman Britain

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (April 2009)

Robert Golden "R.G." Armstrong (born April 7, 1917) is an American actor and playwright. A veteran character actor who appeared in dozens of Westerns over the course of his 40-year career, he may be best remembered for his work with director Sam Peckinpah.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Armstrong was born in Pleasant Grove, Alabama. He came from a family of religious fundamentalists, and his mother wanted him to be a pastor. Armstrong, however, became interested in acting, and while attending the University of North Carolina (along with classmate Andy Griffith), he began acting on stage with the Carolina Playmakers. Upon graduating, he attended the Actors' Studio.

Career[link]

Armstrong quickly launched a career on Broadway. He won considerable acclaim for his role in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He also began writing his own plays, which were performed off-Broadway.

Armstrong's first film appearance was in the 1954 film Garden of Eden. However, it was television where he first earned a name for himself. He guest-starred in virtually every TV Western produced in the 1950s and 1960s, including: Have Gun - Will Travel, The Californians, The Big Valley, The Rifleman, Zane Grey Theater, Wanted: Dead or Alive, The Westerner, Bonanza, Maverick, Gunsmoke, Rawhide and Wagon Train. He also appeared on The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Andy Griffith Show, The Fugitive, Perry Mason, T.H.E. Cat, Hawaii Five-O, Starsky and Hutch, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Dynasty. Armstrong had a recurring role in the second season of Millennium as a reclusive visionary known only as the Old Man. In the late 1980s, he played the demonic "Uncle Lewis Vendredi" in the Canadian horror series Friday the 13th: The Series.

While working on The Westerner, Armstrong made the acquaintance of up-and-coming writer/director Sam Peckinpah. The two immediately struck up a friendship. Peckinpah recognized Armstrong's inner turmoil regarding the religious beliefs of his family and utilized that to brilliant effect in his films. Armstrong would almost always play a slightly unhinged fundamentalist Christian in Peckinpah's films, usually wielding a Bible in one hand and a shotgun in the other. This character archetype appeared in Ride the High Country (1962), Major Dundee (1965), and, perhaps most memorably, in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). However, Armstrong also appeared in The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), playing a more likeable character.

Even outside of Peckinpah's work, however, Armstrong became a tier-one character actor in his own right, appearing in dozens of films over his career, playing both villains and sympathetic characters. Some of his more memorable roles outside of Peckinpah's films include a sympathetic rancher in El Dorado (1966), Cap'n Dan in The Great White Hope (1970), outlaw Clell Miller in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), a bumbling outlaw in My Name is Nobody (1973), Race with the Devil (1975), as well as Children of the Corn (1984), Red Headed Stranger (1986) with Willie Nelson and as the General in Predator (1987). He appeared in several of Warren Beatty's films, including Heaven Can Wait (1978), Reds (1981), and Pruneface in Dick Tracy (1990).

Despite being typecast as gruff and violent characters throughout his career, Armstrong is well known for having a warm and affable personality offscreen. He has been married three times: his first wife was Ann Neale, from whom he has four children; he was then married to Susan Guthrie until 1976; and remained married to his third wife, Mary Craven, until her death in 2004.

Armstrong was semi-retired from films, continuing to be active in off-Broadway theater, until recently retiring because of near-blindness.

Partial filmography[link]

• The Fugitive Kind (1959)
• Ride the High Country (1962)
• Major Dundee (1965)
• El Dorado (1966)
• The Great White Hope (1970)
• The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970)
• J. W. Coop (1972)
• The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972)
• Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)
• My Name is Nobody (1973)
• White Lightning (1973)
• White Line Fever (1975)
• Race with the Devil (1975)
• Stay Hungry (1976)
• The Car (1977)
• Heaven Can Wait (1978)
• The Time Machine (1978)
• Fast Charlie... the Moonbeam Rider (1979)
• Reds (1981)
• Lone Wolf McQuade (1983)
• Children of the Corn (1984)
• The Best of Times (1986)
• Red Headed Stranger (1986)
• Predator (1987)
• Jocks (1987)
• Dick Tracy (1990)
• Purgatory (1999)

Further reading[link]

• Names You Never Remember, With Faces You Never Forget, by Justin Humphreys. BearManor Media, Albany, 2006. ISBN 1-59393-041-0.

External links[link]

• R. G. Armstrong at the Internet Movie Database
• R. G. Armstrong at the Internet Broadway Database
• R. G. Armstrong at AllRovi