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.

Richard McKeon (1900-1985) taught philosophy at the University of Chicago from 1935 to 1973, and at the time of his death had published eleven books and 158 articles on an extraordinary array of topics and cultures. This first volume of an ambitious three-volume work covers philosophic theory through McKeon's writings on first philosophy (metaphysics) and the methods and principles of the sciences.

Richard McKeon enjoys an enviable reputation as an erudite historian of ideas and exegete of philosophic texts. However, the originality and scope of his achievement as a systematic philosopher are less widely known. In this ambitious three-volume edition, of which Philosophy, Science, and Culture is the first, a selection of McKeon's writings will be collected to showcase his distinctive approach to the analysis of discourse. Volume I covers philosophic theory through his writings on first philosophy (metaphysics) and the methods and principles of the sciences, Volume II examines philosophic arts through his writings on aesthetics and forms of discourse as a whole, and Volume III looks at philosophic practice through his writings on world community and the relations of cultures. Philosophy, Science, and Culture covers topics that range from philosophic semantics to the processes of the sciences to the forms of human rights. This collection makes McKeon's mission as a philosopher unmistakable. He characterized himself as a philosophic pluralist; he was an American philosopher in the tradition of the pragmatists, one whose philosophy subtly resonates with C. S. Peirce and John Dewey. McKeon also explored the themes of deconstructionism and other late-twentieth-century philosophies decades before their popular emergence—but, in generating a matrix of possibilities for productive debate, he avoided both relativism and the entrapments of dogmatism. An important collection of his writings, this series will establish Richard McKeon as one of the foremost philosophers of the twentieth century. Richard McKeon (1900-1985) taught philosophy at the University of Chicago from 1935 to 1973, and at the time of his death had published eleven books and 158 articles on an extraordinary array of topics and cultures. Among his many national and international distinctions, he was awarded the highest honor of the American Philosophical Association when he was invited to give the Paul Carus Lectures in New York in 1965.

Edited by Richard McKeon, with an introduction by C.D.C. Reeve Preserved by Arabic mathematicians and canonized by Christian scholars, Aristotle’s works have shaped Western thought, science, and religion for nearly two thousand years. Richard McKeon’s The Basic Works of Aristotle—constituted out of the definitive Oxford translation and in print as a Random House hardcover for sixty years—has long been considered the best available one-volume Aristotle. Appearing in ebook at long last, this edition includes selections from the Organon, On the Heavens, The Short Physical Treatises, Rhetoric, among others, and On the Soul, On Generation and Corruption, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Poetics in their entirety.

This book showcases recent work about reading and books in sociology and the humanities across the globe. From different standpoints and within the broad perspectives within the cultural sociology of reading, the eighteen chapters examine a range of reading practices, genres, types of texts, and reading spaces. They cover the Anglophone area of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia; the transnational, multilingual space constituted by the readership of the Colombian novel One Hundred Years of Solitude; nineteenth-century Chile; twentieth-century Czech Republic; twentieth century Swahili readings in East Africa; contemporary Iran; and China during the cultural revolution and the post-Mao period. The chapters contribute to current debates about the valuation of literature and the role of cultural intermediaries; the iconic properties of textual objects and of the practice of reading itself; how reading supports personal, social and political reflection; bookstores as spaces for sociability and the interplay of high and commercial cultures; the political uses of reading for nation-building and propaganda, and the dangers and gratifications of reading under repression. In line with the cultural sociology of reading’s focus on meaning, materiality and emotion, this book explores the existential, ethical and political consequences of reading in specific locations and historical moments.