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The Forgotten Philosopher: A Review Essay on Richard McKeon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2018

William Selinger
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Extract

In her well-known piece on Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt wrote that “posthumous fame… seems to be the lot of the unclassifiable ones.” It is achieved by “those whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification.” If she is right, then there may be some hope that Richard McKeon will one day have his moment. For McKeon (who was, in fact, a friend of Arendt) is eminently unclassifiable. Born in 1900, he studied philosophy both with the great French medievalist Étienne Gilson and with John Dewey. He was a twentieth-century American pragmatist who sought to revolutionize philosophy so that it could deal with the novel challenges of a technological age. Yet he was also a brilliant scholar of classical and medieval thought, who wrote such articles as “Poetry and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century,” “Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” and “The Hellenistic and Roman Foundations of the Tradition of Aristotle in the West.”

Type
Review Essay
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 80 , Issue 1 , Winter 2018 , pp. 137 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2018 

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References

1 Arendt, Hannah, “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 155Google Scholar.

2 Gewirth, Alan, “Richard Peter McKeon (1900–1985),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 58, no. 5 (1985): 751–52Google Scholar. Quoted in the foreword to On Knowing—The Social Sciences, xiv. For this aspect of McKeon's life and thought see Levine, Donald, Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, vol. 1, Philosophy, Science, and Culture, ed. Swenson, William and McKeon, Zahava (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Selected Writings, vol. 2, Culture, Education, and the Arts, ed. Swenson, William and McKeon, Zahava (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

4 McKeon's students have produced a small though valuable literature on him. See Plochman, George Kimball, Richard McKeon: A Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and the essays in Pluralism in Theory and Practice: Richard McKeon and American Philosophy, ed. Garver, Eugene and Buchanan, Richard (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. See as well Zahava McKeon, general introduction to Selected Writings, 1:1–21; and George Swenson, foreword to Selected Writings, 2:ix–xxiv.

5 Richard McKeon, “The Flight from Certainty and the Quest for Precision,” in Selected Writings, 1:241.

6 For a discussion see Richard McKeon, “Philosophy and History in the Development of Human Rights,” Selected Writings, 1:454–67.

7 McKeon, On Knowing—The Natural Sciences, 8.

8 Richard McKeon, “The Organization of Sciences and the Relations of Cultures,” in Selected Writings, 2:147.

9 Richard McKeon, “Fact and Value in the Philosophy of Culture,” in Selected Writings, 1:429.

10 McKeon, “Flight from Certainty,” 233.

11 Richard McKeon, “Discourse, Demonstration, Verification, and Justification,” in Selected Writings, 2:159.

12 Ibid., 160.

13 Richard McKeon, “The Hellenistic and Roman Foundations of the Tradition of Aristotle in the West,” in Selected Writings, 1:310–11.

14 Ibid., 315–16.

15 Ibid., 325.

16 Richard McKeon, “The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts,” in Selected Writings, 2:201.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 202.

19 Richard McKeon, “Creativity and the Commonplace,” in Selected Writings, 2:45.

20 Ibid., 45–47; and McKeon, “Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age,” 202.

21 McKeon, “Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age,” 209.

22 McKeon, On Knowing—The Social Sciences, 4–5.

23 Ibid., 3.

24 McKeon, On Knowing—The Social Sciences, 5.

25 McKeon, “Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age,” 203.

26 Ibid., 207.

27 I should note that these four particular terms are mine, rather than McKeon's, but I believe they capture what McKeon is saying better than his four, which are construction, assimilation, discrimination, and resolution (On Knowing—The Social Sciences, 10).

28 See Lefort, Claude, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. Macey, David (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

29 For Lefort as a social scientist and analyst of contemporary politics, see the essays in Lefort, Le temps présent: Écrits 1945–2005 (Paris: Belin, 2007)Google Scholar.

30 Schmitt's classic writings include The Concept of the Political, trans. Schwab, George (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. Schwab, George (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985)Google Scholar; The Nomos of the Earth, trans. Ulmen, G. L. (New York: Telos, 2003)Google Scholar; and Constitutional Theory, trans. Seitzer, Jeffrey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

31 See Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

32 Mckeon, On Knowing—The Social Sciences, 46.

33 See Skinner, Quentin, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

34 Mckeon, On Knowing—the Natural Sciences, 8.