On Knowing--The Social Sciences

As a philosopher, Richard McKeon spent his career developing Pragmatism in a new key, specifically by tracing the ways in which philosophic problems arise in fields other than philosophyacross the natural and social sciences and aestheticsand showed the ways in which any problem, pushed back to its beginning or taken to its end, is a philosophic problem. The roots of this book, On KnowingThe Social Sciences, are traced to McKeons classes where he blended philosophy with physics, ethics, politics, history, and aesthetics. This volumethe second in a seriesleaves behind natural science themes to embrace freedom, power, and history, which, McKeon argues, lay out the whole field of human action. The authors McKeon considersHobbes, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Kant, and J. S. Millshow brilliantly how philosophic methods work in action, via analyses that do not merely reduce or deconstruct meaning, but enhance those texts by reconnecting them to the active history of philosophy and to problems of ethics, politics, and history. The waves of modernism and post-modernism are receding. Philosophic pluralism is now available, fully formulated, in McKeons work, spreading from the humanities to the social sciences.