Project MUSE®: Philosophy & Rhetoric - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/151
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Philosophy & Rhetoric.daily12026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 32, no. 2 (1999);
Vol. 33 (2000) through current issueLatest Articles: Philosophy & RhetoricTWOProject MUSE®Philosophy & Rhetoric1527-20790031-8213Latest articles in Philosophy & Rhetoric. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Interdisciplinary Uncanny: On Not Recognizing Richard McKeon
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985043
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Let fear be defined as a painful or troubled feeling caused by the impression [φαντασία] of an imminent evil that causes destruction or pain.Increasingly, every act of communication between human beings seems an act of translation.The memory-image is vivid, detached from context and sense, yet running deep, like a recurrent dream. An event already also a repetition. An older man appears, enters the seminar room. Something is afoot. There is a surge of energy, anxiety, an unsettling. A change has taken place, an atmospheric dislocation: a darkening, a disconcerting. Now a new tension sits in the space. A strain alongside, distinct from, the focused anticipation of an audience waiting together (so unlike today's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/151/image/coversmallThe Interdisciplinary Uncanny: On Not Recognizing Richard McKeon2026-03-12text/htmlen-USThe Interdisciplinary Uncanny: On Not Recognizing Richard McKeon2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®1259192026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Dialectic, Dialogue, and Difference
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985044
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Richard McKeon (1975)1 calls the relationships between the triad of Greek dialectic and dialogue and rhetoric the "fruitful interplay of controversy and agreement" (25), and judges this to be the contribution of Greek dialectic to Western history and thought. But the nature of this dialectic is complex and varied. Zeno may have likened it to a closed fist (in contrast to the open hand of rhetoric) because of its concise arguments (McKeon 1975, 16–17),2 but no such concision characterizes the variety of dialectics on display in the works that have come down to us.On one level, the understanding of dialectic reflects the conception of philosophy that underlies a particular set of practices. Socrates, Plato, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/151/image/coversmallDialectic, Dialogue, and Difference2026-03-12text/htmlen-USDialectic, Dialogue, and Difference2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®610512026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12McKeon on Rhetoric and Technology: The Challenge of 0 (Zero)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985045
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Without knowing the (Arabic) numeral 0, Aristotle, Richard McKeon's chief guide and "influencer," embraced techné (τέχνη), the precursor of today's term "technology." In contrast to our world enfolded in zero-based computer-generated digitality, Aristotle's world was one where knowledge was circumscribed in the enigmatic injunction at the gate to Plato's academy: Let no one who has not grasped the mathematical [geometry] enter here.1 Framed as "the fundamental condition for the proper possibility of knowing," geometry as a branch of mathematics concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures defined cognition, albeit rendered in alphabetic (Roman) numerals.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/151/image/coversmallMcKeon on Rhetoric and Technology: The Challenge of 0 (Zero)2026-03-12text/htmlen-USMcKeon on Rhetoric and Technology: The Challenge of 0 (Zero)2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®904102026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12An Approach to Reading McKeon: History, Philosophy, Law
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985046
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"I certainly have great respect for Richard McKeon and his work," Hannah Arendt wrote in 1971, a statement that many who knew McKeon would have echoed.1 Yet today, McKeon is largely forgotten. One reason for this is that his writings are so strange and difficult.2 Indeed, they defy our basic expectations about what scholarly or philosophical writings are supposed to do. They do not assemble evidence to persuade the reader of a particular position. Nor do they explain how something has occurred. When McKeon wrote about "love" or "imitation" or "history," he was not laying down theses about these topics—any more than a painting by Mondrian titled New York City was a picture of New York City. Like Mondrian, McKeon was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/151/image/coversmallAn Approach to Reading McKeon: History, Philosophy, Law2026-03-12text/htmlen-USAn Approach to Reading McKeon: History, Philosophy, Law2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®755882026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Taxis Over Style?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985047
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Some preliminary remarks, in the style of the opening paragraphs of the Rhetoric, where Aristotle takes issue with the manuals of speaking and clears a path for rhetoric. Rhetoricians should always go back to those seminal sentences, Unzeitgemäss as the Nietzschean unactual.First, this article does not engage in considerations on writing philosophy and style, whether authors described as writing philosophy have a style, or a "rhetoric," that is philosophical per se, or not, and whether it has a bearing, or not, direct or indirect, on the veracity of their dialectic. That is not my intent here. I deliberately leave it to whom it belongs by right of disciplinarity (Curatolo and Poirier 2024).Second, I shall not
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/151/image/coversmallTaxis Over Style?2026-03-12text/htmlen-USTaxis Over Style?2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®521292026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Richard McKeon's Rhetorical Pluralism of Philosophical Functions
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985048
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"Eloquence," as Quintilian says, "is the ability to speak wholly on a subject (Institutio Oratoria, 8.15–16), and as Giambattista Vico says [in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709)], "the whole is really the flower of wisdom."Most of the scholarly questions that our journal editor, the late Erik Doxtader, proposed to contributors for this special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric belong to meta-philosophy, however conceived—which, as it happens, was the abiding central preoccupation of all of Richard McKeon's professional words and deeds throughout his life. Since it has been traditionally accepted that philosophy deals with "the whole" of reality, "meta"-reflections on wholes (and parts) will have the greatest
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/151/image/coversmallRichard McKeon's Rhetorical Pluralism of Philosophical Functions2026-03-12text/htmlen-USRichard McKeon's Rhetorical Pluralism of Philosophical Functions2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®1082262026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12The Intellectual and Cultural Origins of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric Project: Commentaries on and Translations of Seven Foundational Articles, 1933–1958 by Michelle Bolduc and David A. Frank (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985049
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It is a mere fifty-five years since the bulk of the New Rhetoric Project (NRP) was presented to English-speaking (and –reading) audiences in the John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver 1969 translation. Not long in the grand scheme of things, but long enough for certain orthodoxies to become established in the literature. We know, for example, that this was a return to Aristotle to recover ideas that had long been lost and that would undergird the logic of value.1 And we know that the "Universal Audience" is a problematic and confused idea. But such received ideas are what this collection of essays challenges.If there has been a rhetorical turn in argumentation theory (Bolduc 2020, 9), then that turn has safely been
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/151/image/coversmallThe Intellectual and Cultural Origins of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric Project: Commentaries on and Translations of Seven Foundational Articles, 1933–1958 by Michelle Bolduc and David A. Frank (review)2026-03-12text/htmlen-USThe Intellectual and Cultural Origins of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric Project: Commentaries on and Translations of Seven Foundational Articles, 1933–1958 by Michelle Bolduc and David A. Frank (review)2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®279832026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12