The Forgotten Philosopher: A Review Essay on Richard McKeon

Abstract

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.”