Well before the current age of discourse, deconstruction, and
multiculturalism, Richard McKeon propounded a philosophy of pluralism
showing how facts and values are dependent on diverse ways of reading
texts. This book is a transcription of an entire course, including both
lectures and student discussions, taught by McKeon. As such, it provides
an exciting introduction to McKeon's conception of pluralism, a central
aspect of neo-Pragmatism, while demonstrating how pluralism works in a
classroom setting.
In his lectures, McKeon outlines the entire history of Western thinking
on the sciences. Treating the central concepts of motion, space, time,
and cause, he traces modern intellectual debates back to the ancient
Greeks, notably Plato, Aristotle, Democritus, and the Sophists. As he
brings the story of Western science up to the twentieth century, he uses
his fabled semantic schema (reproduced here for the first time) to
uncover new ideas and observations about cosmology, mechanics, dynamics,
and other aspects of physical science.
Illustrating the broad historical sweep of the lectures are a series of
discussions which give detail to the course's intellectual framework.
These discussions of Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and Maxwell are
perhaps the first published rendition of a philosopher in literal
dialogue with his students. Led by McKeon's pointed questioning, the
discussions reveal the difficulties and possibilities of learning to
engage in serious intellectual communication.
