This chapter examines first the gradual infiltration of logical empiricism into British philosophy during the 1930s, mainly through lectures by Schlick and Carnap, and not necessarily in accordance with Neurath’s ideas. L. Susan Stebbing played an important role as mediator, although she reflected on differences between the Viennese and the British analytical approaches. A. J. Ayer’s bestselling book Language, Truth, and Logic prepared the ground to some extent, but, by the time Neurath arrived to give a series of lectures at Oxford University, philosophers were mostly absent serving in the war. Neurath’s lectures are reconstructed from his notes, and the changes and developments in his philosophy of science are examined, also with reference to his monograph Foundations of the Social Sciences. We show that Neurath’s late work adapted to British sociological and anthropological thinking, often at the cost of bitter debates with old friends, such as Rudolf Carnap.

Collingwood’s criticism of analytic philosophy is essentially an accusation of ahistoricality and implicit dogmatism. Russell and Moore, who are Collingwood’s primary targets, had a theory of analysis that would clarify sentences by situating them in the context of all possible expressive power. This strategy is what I call single-commitment tracking. Collingwood argues that there is no way of providing a non-dogmatic account of the constitutive features of a single-commitment tracking account. Instead, Collingwood adopts multi-commitment tracking, in which an expressed commitment set has its constitutive features, which Collingwood calls “absolute presuppositions,” made explicit by an expressing commitment set. This achieves the clarity desired by analytic philosophy, but also introduces something which itself is uninterpreted. So, there is no explicatable context of all possible expressive power, and Collingwood has shown that it is only by engaging in this method of explicating absolute presuppositions, which he calls metaphysics, that new expressive power is unlocked.