This article aims to situate R. G. Collingwood's conception of analysis and metaphysics within the philosophical context of the 1930s Britain. Philosophers of the Cambridge School of Analysis, such as Susan Stebbing, argued for metaphysical analysis aimed at uncovering ‘basic facts’ underlying the metaphysical structure of the world, while logical positivists like A. J. Ayer denied its possibility. In the early stages of the dispute between these philosophers, Collingwood criticized Stebbing's conception of analysis as paradoxical, yet defended metaphysical analysis against logical positivists. Throughout, I demonstrate that Collingwood's conception of metaphysics as ‘a science of absolute presuppositions’ was the fruit of his constructive engagement in his contemporary debates, rather than due to an idiosyncratic interest in history.

This paper aims to clarify John Stuart Mill's metaphysics of ‘Permanent Possibility of Sensation’. After formulating the three metaphysical positions that Mill considers as possible options, I argue that Mill's arguments for his idealist metaphysics are primarily epistemological: according to his empiricist epistemology, the existence of material substance cannot be known through intuition or inference. However, this does not lead him to conclude that the external world does not exist. Instead, by redefining matter as a permanent possibility of sensation, Mill insists that we can indeed have knowledge of objects that are, in certain significant senses, external. Mill's metaphysical project is thus reconstructed as an attempt to establish a thoroughgoingly empiricist but non-sceptical metaphysics.

If we sympathize with one another properly, there must be ‘a free communication of sentiments and opinions’, or the freedom of expression. But this freedom had been threatened by the law of seditious libel in Britain. After the abolishment of the censorship, the seditious libel became the major instrument to suppress the unfavorable opinions for the government. In order to support the freedom of expression, Smith argued about a kind of processual rule of justice concerning the criminal intent. The rule required the common law courts to judge the action from the point of ‘actual evil and the immediate fear of it’.