Synopses & Reviews
Richard McKeon was a philosopher of extraordinary creativity who brought profoundly original ideas to bear on more standard ways of thinking and learning. A classicist, medievalist, and revolutionary intellectual, he fashioned an approach to philosophy as a plural conversation among varied traditions of thought, epochs, and civilizations. This second volume of McKeon's selected works demonstrates his approach to inquiry and practice in culture, education, and the arts.
Together, the writings in this book show how McKeon reinvented the ancient arts of rhetoric, grammar, logic, and dialectic for the new circumstances of a global culture. In essays on creation and criticism, for instance, rhetoric is distinguished from grammar and shown to be the master art of invention, judgment, and pluralistic interpretation. Writings on themes of culture, meanwhile, explore the self-invention of mankind as justification for the arts, the development of the humanities, and the organization of the sciences. In the closing essays on education and philosophy, McKeon considers the implications of his ideas for the future of the liberal arts and higher learning.
Review
"A useful compilation of hard-to-find papers by a neglected scholar whose work still speaks to classicists, philosophers, intellectual historians, and educators. Students of pluralism, rhetoric, the history of ideas, education, and literary theory will find stimulating essays in this collection. The editors . . . have done a service to humansitic scholarship."
Review
"In this second volume [is] a collection of esssays on culture, education, and the arts that continue to reveal McKeon's deep infusion into the American philosophical tradition. . . . McKeon's constribution to the study of the classics and to general education cannot be ignored. In no other figure does the intersection of American philosophy and classical literature play a more prominent role."
About the Author
Richard McKeon (1900-85) was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy and Classics at the University of Chicago.
Table of Contents
Foreword by William G. Swenson
Acknowledgments
Introduction to Volume 2 by Wayne C. Booth
Part I: Creation and Criticism
1. Criticism and the Liberal Arts: The Chicago School of Criticism
2. Creativity and the Commonplace
3. Pluralism of Interpretations and Pluralism of Objects, Actions, and Statements Interpreted
4. Pride and Prejudice: Thought, Character, Argument, and Plot
5. The Judgment of "Judgment"
6. The Methods of Rhetoric and Philosophy: Invention and Judgment
Part II: Arts and Themes of Cultures
7. Man and Mankind in the Development of Culture and the Humanities
8. The Organization of Sciences and the Relations of Cultures in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
9. Discourse, Demonstration, Verification, and Justification
10. The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological