Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 1 | Page 32

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utilisation of semi-penal arenas of control, I am describing the history of thought
which is in essence, seeking to decode and explain the process of human thought.34
‘The habit of “spatialising” time’, as described by Collingwood, generates the
problem of ‘temporal distance: every year that passes pushes us further away from
past events, with the worry that the further they recede into the past, the less
accessible they become’.35 This drawback ‘provides implicit support to scepticism, as
practical difficulties are surreptitiously turned into matter of principle’:36 ‘Historical
knowledge’ Collingwood further asserts, ‘is the re-enactment of a past thought
encapsulated in a context of present thoughts which, by contradictin