 The relevance of Collingwood’s defence of the autonomy of history to debates concerning the unity/disunity of science was brought to the attention of a wider audience by W. H. Dray during the 1950s and 60s. Dray (1958, 1963) located Collingwood’s action/event distinction within the context of contemporary debates in the philosophy of social science and drew on the work of Collingwood to reject the claim for methodological unity advanced by Hempel in his influential 1942 article: “The Function of General Laws in History”. Hempel claimed that explanations in history are covertly nomological explanations because historians, just as natural scientists, rely upon general laws, even if they do not explicitly mention them. Dray argued that Hempel failed to see that what distinguishes action from event explanations is the nature of the connection between the explanans and the explanandum. In naturalistic explanations the explanans is an antecedent condition, a state of affairs which precedes in time the event whose cause it is said to be; in the historical explanation of action the explanans is the logical ground of an action, the thought that renders the action intelligible. Whilst in the 1950s and 60s Collingwood played an important role in the debate concerning the logical form of action explanation and how it differs from the causal explanation of events, his work became less influential in the second half of the twentieth century. The neglect into which Collingwood’s account of action and its explanation has fallen is linked to a change in metaphilosophical assumptions and the return of the kind of metaphysics which he had sought to replace with the presuppositional analysis described in An Essay on Metaphysics.