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This article argues that, in order to understand Peter Winch’s view of philosophy, it is profitable to read him together with R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history. Collingwood was both an important source for Winch and a thinker engaged in a closely parallel philosophical pursuit. Collingwood and Winch shared the view that philosophy is an effort to understand the various ways in which human beings make reality intelligible. For both, this called for rapprochement between philosophy and the humanities. Like Collingwood, Winch wanted to reformulate philosophy as a form of human science. Both thinkers advanced a conception of logic where the validity of judgements, propositions, and thought are dependent on their function as instruments in human dialogue. In their treatments of logic, Winch and Collingwood were fleshing out their idea that questions concerning human meaningful behaviour also tie back to the question of what philosophical analysis is about. There is a deep connection between two main issues in both Collingwood’s and Winch’s writings: on the one hand, the need for ‘internal’ understanding of how human beings relate to reality, and on the other hand, their critique of the idea of logic as a self-sufficient system, external to historically embedded forms of life. At the core of their shared vision there was a comprehensive critique of metaphysical realism.

This paper compares R. G. Collingwood and Peter Winch, with Wittgenstein as an important background figure. Their shared philosophical concerns were (1) resistance to ontology, especially metaphysical realism, in favour of a view on philosophy as cultural self-understanding; and (2) critique of the idea of logic as a formal science, labelled “Aristotelian Logic”. Instead, they advanced a conception of logic as the contextually sensitive analysis of actual reasoning. The connection between these two concerns was particularly explicit in Collingwood’s work. We bring out the connection via their reactions to Moore’s “Proof of an External World”. The meaning of what Moore says is indeterminate, because he has not specified the doubt to which his “Proof” is an answer. We see the logical status of a statement when we understand how it constitutes an answer to a question that has arisen. As Collingwood would put it, the logical analysis of a concrete piece of reasoning is an ‘historical’ exercise.