Some Varieties of Intellectual HistoryThe Arts Compared: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics. James S. Malek

Abstract

James Malek's The Arts Compared' is a new branch from a tree now some forty years old-the most recent product of a distinctive kind of intellectual history which has flourished at the University of Chicago since soon after Richard McKeon arrived there from Columbia in 1934 as a young professor of philosophy and classics. McKeon's influence on humanistic teaching and scholarship at Chicago has had many facets, the most familiar of which to outsiders (though often not well understood) is the neo-Aristotelian literary criticism particularly associated with R. S. Crane and Elder Olson, to which McKeon's contribution, indirect but essential, was the basic interpretation of Aristotle's philosophy, including his aesthetics. Though the critical writings of Crane and Olson undoubtedly added something new and valuable to the theory and practice of criticism in our time, McKeon's ideas about the way intellectual history should be written were expounded and exemplified earlier, were adopted and put to use in more books and articles by a larger number of scholars, and may in the long run prove more enduring and fruitful. Some of the landmarks of this tradition, since McKeon's own pioneering essay on the concept of imitation (1936), are books and articles by Crane, Olson, Bernard Weinberg, W. J. Hipple, Robert Marsh, Phillip Harth, and Douglas H. White.2 Malek's chief models are Hipple and