Abstract
Richard McKeon (1900–1985) was a towering intellectual figure whose vast corpus of work is, outside a handful of essays, little read today. In the context of this volume, McKeon is noteworthy as someone who developed theories of both rhetoric and communication—explicitly so named—within a framework that his student Douglas Mitchell describes as “Pragmatism in a new key.” My overall aim in the essay is to draw together and extend the small but important body of commentary on McKeon’s “new key” of pragmatism and his theories of both rhetoric and communication. I will show how they constitute a problem-oriented, pragmatist rhetorical philosophy for a historically evolving, pluralistic world marked by traditional and emergent communication practices and media technologies. In so doing, I intend to draw readers’ attention to the fuller range of McKeon’s writings on rhetoric and communication and offer overarching characterizations that make them more available than they have been to this point.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Many philosophers try to reclaim mid-century pragmatism, but none makes even passing mention of McKeon . The key book-length exception comes from a rhetorician, Danisch (2015).
- 2.
Although McKeon was strongly influenced by Aristotle , he repeatedly claimed that he was “no Aristotelian,” but “viewed himself primarily as an American philosopher, in the tradition of the pragmatists. His devotion to pluralism was thoroughgoing. Politically, he was a World Federalist” (Editors’ Preface to McKeon 1986, 577; see also Buchanan 2000, 141, 153–158).
- 3.
For good overall introductions to McKeon’s work, see the Introductions by Ruttenberg and by Zahava McKeon in the University of Chicago Press collections of his essays (McKeon 1990, 2005). The only book-length monograph is the important study by Plochmann (1990). Buchanan and Garver (2000) has number of penetrating essays, including several touching upon McKeon’s rhetorical thought. For helpful discussions of his writings on rhetoric, see Backman (in McKeon 1987, vii–xxxii), Depew (2010), Goodnight (2014), Hauser and Cushman (1973), and Wess (2015).
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
As an educator, McKeon left his mark on, among others, the philosopher Richard Rorty , philosopher-novelist Robert Persig (whose figure of the professor in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was inspired by McKeon ), writer-filmmaker Susan Sontag, wide-ranging intellectual Paul Goodman, poet-literary critic Elder Olson, sociologist Donald Levine, anthropologist Paul Rabinow, University of Chicago editor Douglas Mitchell, and a group of rhetoricians and rhetorically attuned philosophers and critics that included Wayne Booth, Eugene Garver, Richard Buchanan, Thomas Farrell, Thomas Conley, Walter Watson, and indirectly David Depew—a list whose near absence of women should remind us of the gendered conditions of intellectual production of McKeon’s career and the lines of (often ambivalent) male relations that ran through it.
- 7.
Most notably in the 1948 UNESCO -edited symposium Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations and the 1951 McKeon -edited Democracy in a World of Tensions. The concepts of responsibility, justice, and society were treated in issues of the Revue Internationale de Philosophie Volumes 39 (1957), 41 (1957) and 55 (1961) respectively.
- 8.
The sense of truth being one but given many expressions would also be a lesson the Thomist Etienne Gilson would underscore to McKeon in Paris.
- 9.
While still Dewey’s colleague at Columbia, McKeon (1933) obliquely critiqued his former teacher’s approach to the history of thought. Comparing Dewey’s treatment of medieval philosophy to Hegel’s, McKeon observed, “Philosophers…are untrustworthy guides to the historic lineaments and thoughts of the ages and the men whom, for the purposes of…philosophy, they attempt to describe or controvert” (433). He concluded that “[t]he impractical, supernatural, medieval thinker of recent construction is explained less by the social and economic organizations…of his times, than by the philosophic convictions of our own times” (436).
- 10.
Wess (2015) dates McKeon’s turn to rhetoric to mid-century, but my reading of his corpus shows rhetoric to be a topic of interest from the 1920s forward, albeit one that accelerates in the 1950s and ’60s.
- 11.
- 12.
Here I disagree with Barankowski’s characterization of McKeon as practicing an “aesthetic pragmatism” that challenged Dewey’s linkage of science and democracy, emphasized the power of words to construct realities, and interjected a corrective based on art instead of science. This underplays McKeon’s allegiance to a Dewey-inspired problematic method and the plural forms of inquiry it required.
- 13.
Thanks to Chris Voparil and Robert Danisch for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
References
Aiken, Scott F., and Robert B. Talisse. 2017. Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Nature of Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
Baranowski, Brad. 2016. “The Unending Conversation: Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon’s Aesthetic Pragmatism, 1920–1960.” Modern Intellectual History 1 (1): 1–32.
Bergman, Mats. 2016. “Melioristic Inquiry and Critical Habits: Pragmatism and the Ends of Communication Research.” Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 7 (2): 173–188.
Bryson, Lyman. 1948. The Communication of Ideas. New York: Harper and Row.
Buchanan, Richard. 2000. “The Ecology of Culture: Pluralism and Circumstantial Metaphysics.” In Pluralism in Theory and Practice, edited by R. Buchanan and E. Garver, 135–162. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Buchanan, Richard, and Eugene Garver, eds. 2000. Pluralism in Theory and Practice: Richard McKeon and American Philosophy. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Craig, Robert T. 2016. “Pragmatist Realism in Communication Theory.” Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 7 (2): 115–128.
Danisch, Robert. 2008. Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
———. 2015. “Richard McKeon’s Philosophy of Rhetoric.” In Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism, 119–151. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press.
Depew, David J. 2000. “Between Pragmatism and Realism: Richard McKeon’s Philosophical Semantics.” In Pluralism in Theory and Practice, edited by R. Buchanan and E. Garver, 29–53. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
———. 2010. “Revisiting McKeon’s Architectonic Rhetoric.” In Reengaging the Prospects of Rhetoric, edited by Mark Porrovecchio, 37–56. New York: Routledge.
Dewey, John. 1920 [1957]. Reconstruction in Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press.
———. 1925 [1958]. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover.
———. 1929 [1980]. The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action. New York: Perigree Books.
Doxtader, Eric. 2010. “The Rhetorical Question of Human Rights—A Preface.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96 (4): 353–379.
Garver, Eugene. 1984. “Richard McKeon’s Chapter in the History of Rhetoric: Or, Why Does McKeon Write So Funny?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 14 (1/2): 3–14.
———. 2000. “Pluralism and the Virtues of Philosophy.” In Pluralism in Theory and Practice, edited by R. Buchanan and E. Garver, 110–134. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Goodnight, G. Thomas. 2014. “From Architectonics to Polytechtonics: Rhetoric, Communication, and Information.” POROI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention 10 (1): 1–21.
Gross, Neil. 2008. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hauser, Gerard, and Donald Cushman. 1973. “McKeon’s Philosophy of Communication: The Architectonic and Interdisciplinary Arts.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 6: 211–234.
Harvanek, Robert. 1956. “Historical Semantics: A Discussion of the Recent Work of Richard McKeon.” New Scholasticism 30: 257–285.
Koopman, Colin. 2013. “Review of Michael Bacon, Pragmatism: An Introduction.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 04 (31). http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/pragmatis-an-introduction/. Accessed 27 June 2017.
Levine, Donald. 2006. “Richard McKeon: Architecton of the Human Mind.” In Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America, 91–113. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mitchell, Douglas. (2016). “Creating Community Through Communication: Richard McKeon’s Philosophical Pluralism.” In Schools: Studies in Education, vol. 13, no. 2, 243–248.
McKeon, Richard. 1929. “The Empiricist and Experimentalist Temper in the Middle Ages: A Prolegomenon to the Study of Mediaeval Science.” In Essays in Honor of John Dewey, 216–234. New York: Henry Holt.
———. 1933. “Utility and Philosophy in the Middle Ages.” Speculum: A Journal of Mediaeval Studies 8: 431–436.
———. 1935. “Renaissance and Method in Philosophy.” In Studies in the History of Ideas, edited by Columbia University Department of Philosophy, vol. 3, 37–114. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 1941. “Introduction: The Philosophy of Aristotle.” In The Basic Works of Aristotle, xi–xxxiv. New York: Random House.
———. 1947. “Economic, Political, and Moral Communities in the World Society.” Ethics 57: 79–91.
———. 1949 [2005]. “The Nature and Teaching of the Humanities.” Rpt. In Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, Vol. 2: Culture, Education, and the Arts, vol. 2, 235–254. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1950a. “An American Reaction to the Present Situation in French Philosophy.” In Philosophic Thought in France and the United States, 337–362. Buffalo: University of Buffalo Publications in Philosophy.
———. 1950b. “Introduction to the Philosophy of Cicero.” In Brutus: On the Nature of the Gods; On Divination; On Duties, edited by Marcus Tullius Cicero, 1–65. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1950c. “Philosophy and the Diversity of Cultures.” Ethics 60: 233–260.
———. 1952 [1987]. “A Philosopher Meditates on Discovery.” Rpt. In Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, edited and with an introduction by Mark Backman, 194–220. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.
———. 1952 [1990]. “Freedom and History.” Rpt. In Freedom and History and Other Essays.
———. 1952. “Philosophy and Action.” Ethics 62: 79–100.
———. 1953 [1990]. “Spiritual Autobiography.” Rpt. In Freedom and History and Other Essays, 3–36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1953. “Communication and Community as Philosophy.” Ethics 63 (3), Part 1: 190–206.
———. 1956 [1990]. “Dialogue and Controversy in Philosophy.” Rpt. In Freedom and History and Other Essays, 103–125. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1957 [1990]. “Communication, Truth, and Society.” Rpt. In Freedom and History and Other Essays, 88–102.
———. 1965. “Philosophy as a Humanism.” Philosophy Today 9: 151–167.
———. 1966 [1987]. “The Methods of Rhetoric and Philosophy: Invention and Judgment.” Rpt. In Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, edited and with an introduction by Mark Backman, 56–65. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.
———. 1966 [1990]. “Philosophical Semantics and Philosophical Inquiry. Published for the First Time.” In Freedom and History and Other Essays, 242–256. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1970 [1987]. “Philosophy of Communications and the Arts.” Rpt. In Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, edited and with an introduction by Mark Backman, 95–120. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.
———. 1970 [1990]. “Philosophy and History in the Development of Human Rights.” In Freedom and History and Other Essays, 37–61. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1971 [1987]. “The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts.” Rpt. In Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, edited and with an introduction by Mark Backman, 1–24. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.
———. 1975. “The Circumstances and Functions of Philosophy.” In Philosophers on Their Own Work, edited by André Mercier and Maja Svilar, 95–142. Bern: Verlag Herbert Lang.
———. 1982. “Criticism and the Liberal Arts: The Chicago School of Criticism.” Profession 82: 1–26.
———. 1986. “Pluralism of Interpretation and Pluralism of Objects, Actions, and Statements Interpreted.” Critical Inquiry 12: 576–596.
———. 1987. Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, edited and with an introduction by Mark Backman. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.
———. 1990. Freedom and History and Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2005. Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, Vol. 2: Culture, Education, and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McKeon, Richard, and Kenneth Burke. 1970. Rhetoric and Poetic. Transcript of Public Discussion, 13 November. Richard McKeon Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago Libraries, Box 123, Folder 5.
McKeon, Zahava. 1998. “Introduction to McKeon.” In Selected Writings, vol. 1, edited by Zahava K. McKeon and G. William, 1–21. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Plochmann, George. 1990. Richard McKeon: A Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Robinson, James Harvey. 1912. The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook. New York: Macmillan.
Ryan, Alan. 1995. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. New York: Norton.
Selzer, Jack. 1996. Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Simonson, Peter. 2001. “The Varieties of Pragmatism and Communication: Visions and Revisions from Peirce to Peters.” In Pragmatism and Communication Research, edited by David K. Perry, 1–26. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Talisse, Robert B. 2013. “Recovering American Philosophy.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49 (3): 424–433.
UNESCO. 1947. The Grounds of an International Declaration of Human Rights. Paris, 31 July. http://unesdoc.UNESCO.org/images/0012/001243/124350eb.pdf. Accessed 20 June 2017.
UNESCO. 1948. Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations. Symposium with an Introduction by Jacques Maritain. Paris, 25 July. http://unesdoc.UNESCO.org/images/0015/001550/155042eb.pdf. Accessed 20 June 2017.
University of Chicago. 1942. Study in Communications and Public Opinion. Brochure for the Academic Year 1942–1943. Richard P. McKeon Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago Library. Box 87, Folder 11.
Watson, Walter. 1994. “McKeon’s Semantic Schema.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 27 (2): 85–103.
Wess, Robert. 2008. “Burke’s McKeon Side: Burke’s Pentad and McKeon’s Quartet.” In Kenneth Burke and His Circles, edited by Jack Selzer and R. Wess. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press.
———. 2015. “A McKeonist Understanding of Kenneth Burke’s Rhetorical Realism in Particular and Constructivism in General.” KB Journal 11 (1): np. http://www.kbjournal.org/wess_mckeon.
Woodbridge, Frederick J. E. 1912. The Purpose of History. New York: Columbia University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Simonson, P. (2019). Richard McKeon in the Pragmatist Tradition. In: Danisch, R. (eds) Recovering Overlooked Pragmatists in Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-14342-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-14343-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)