 In so far as Collingwood’s account of re-enactment defends the possibility of knowing the past as it always was for historical agents (the historian, as we have seen, seeks to establish what crossing the Rubicon meant to a Roman cognizant of Republican law) it goes against a view that became dominant in the latter part of the twentieth century, according to which the past cannot be known as it always was because it is constantly and necessarily revised from the perspective of the present. This view was endorsed with varying degrees of emphasis in the philosophical hermeneutics of H-G. Gadamer, in the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of language. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics claimed that the past “is understood only if it is understood in a different way every time” (1960 [1975: 275]) because the meaning of a text is the result of a fusion of the horizons of the text to be interpreted and the horizon of the interpreter. In the philosophy of history narrativists such as Hayden White (1973), Frank Ankersmit (1983) and Keith Jenkins (1991) emphasised the cultural endowment of the historian as the lens through which the past is accessed. Even the philosophy of language was not immune from this trend. Quine (1960) famously denied that it is possible to achieve determinacy in translation in direct opposition to Collingwood’s claim that it is at least in principle possible to re-enact the very same thought as the historical agent. This revisionary view of the past goes against Collingwood’s conception of what it means to understand the past historically. The task of the historian, as he saw it, is to transport us to another world by immersing oneself in the historical agent’s own context of thought.