On Knowing - The Social Sciences

With the philosophic school of American Pragmatism once more on the ascendance, in Europe as well as North America and elsewhere, Richard McKeon’s time has arrived. A student of John Dewey, and a master of textual exegesis without parallel in any field, McKeon brought to focus the pluralism of methods that, whether formally engaged in rarefied academic debate or deployed in political controversy and everyday life, serve to connect ideas with action. In binging philosophy down from the skies (following Socrates and Cicero), McKeon was an anti-dogmatist who showed the many routes that lead to truths that find multiple expressions. He did this systematically, and the best place to begin is here, with his three-course introduction to philosophy, offered to undergraduates in the 1960s. One volume is published (On KnowingThe Natural Sciences). This, the second volume (on social science), leaves behind natural science themes from physics of motion, space, time, and causality to embrace freedom, power, and history, which lay out the whole field of human action. The texts McKeon and the class considerHobbes, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Kant, and J.S. Millshow brilliantly how philosophic methods work in action, via analysis of texts that do not merely reduce or deconstruct meaning, but enhance those texts by reconnecting them to the active history of philosophy and to the problems we face in ethics, politics, and history. The waves of modernism and post-modernism (and the tyranny of French theory) are receding. Philosophic pluralism is now available, fully formulated, in McKeon’s work, spreading from the humanities to the social sciences and science studies.

Richard McKeon (1900–85) was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy and Classics at the University of Chicago.David B. Owen is professor emeritus of education at Iowa State University.Joanne K. Olson is professor in the School of Education at Iowa State University.