 Much philosophy of history tends to be governed by an epistemological concern with how historical knowledge is possible beginning from the assumption that historical knowledge is knowledge of the past. The primary task of a philosophy of history is consequently taken to be that of explaining how the past can be known given that, unlike the present, it is not available for observation, nor can it be reproduced under experimental conditions. Collingwood’s approach to the philosophy of history is quite different. He denied that a mere concern with the past is sufficient to identify a distinctive subject matter for historical inquiry, one which justifies considering history as a science, in the Latin sense of scientia, i.e., a form of knowing. The past after all is studied by geologists, as well as historians so if history is a distinctive form of knowing it must do more than merely study the past. He therefore took the primary task of a philosophy of history to be that of articulating not an epistemological theory accounting for how the past can be known, but that of disambiguating the subject matter of history from that of natural science by applying the presuppositional analysis that he had expounded in An Essay on Metaphysics to historical knowledge. The application of this presuppositional analysis yields the claim that the presuppositions of history are different from those of natural science because reenacting the thoughts of past agents involves re-thinking conceptual connections. Historians presuppose that past agents are responsive to norms, not that their behaviour conforms to natural laws. The task of philosophical analysis is to uncover these different presuppositions with a view to showing that there is no conflict between the claims of history and those of science, not because historical explanations are incomplete nomological explanations, but because they are complete explanations of a different kind, which answer different kinds of questions. This of course is not to deny that there are important epistemological questions concerning the past but rather that the distinctive epistemology of historical knowing can be articulated only once the kind of past with which history is concerned is clearly identified: