¹ Burke, Kenneth, Attitudes toward History (Boston, 1961; first published 1937), 246 Google Scholar.

² Burke to McKeon, 24 Dec. 1979, Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University (hereafter Burke Papers), original emphasis. The spelling errors here are found in the original letter. I have avoided adding the usual “sic” after them since this would distract from the content and form of Burke's reminiscence.

³ Pirsig, Robert, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (New York, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁴ See Selzer, Jack, Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing with the Moderns, 1915–1931 (Madison, WI, 1996)Google Scholar; Selzer, Jack and George, Ann, Kenneth Burke in the 1930s (Columbia, SC, 2007)Google Scholar.

⁵ For an important exception to this rule for Burke see Genter, Robert, Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America (Philadelphia, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ See Hollinger, David A., “The Defense of Democracy and Robert K. Merton's Formulation of the Scientific Ethos,” in Hollinger, , Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, 1996), 80–96 Google Scholar.

⁷ Dewey, John, “Science as Subject-Matter and as Method,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 6, ed. Boydston, Jo Ann (Carbondale, IL, 1978), 78 Google Scholar.

⁸ See Jewett, Andrew, Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge, 2013)Google Scholar. For other attempts by social scientists and philosophers to connect their understanding of the “scientific method” with a normative embrace of democracy see Cohen-Cole, Jamie, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago, 2014)Google Scholar; Smith, Mark C., Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918–1941 (Durham, NC, 1994)Google Scholar; Purcell, Edward Jr, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, KY, 1973)Google Scholar.

⁹ John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1980; first published 1934), 109. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 332.

¹⁰ James Light quoted in Selzer, Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village, 20.

¹¹ Burke quoted. in ibid., 61.

¹² Burke, Attitudes toward History, 172.

¹³ Selzer, Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village, 19.

¹⁴ For Burke during the 1920s see ibid.

¹⁵ Ibid.,179. Burke stated his skepticism of the autonomy of the individual in a later work: “The so-called ‘I’ is merely a unique combination of partially conflicting ‘corporate we's.’” Burke, Attitudes toward History, 264.

¹⁶ As the historian Robert Genter, Late Modernism, 276, writes, “Although he recognized the philosophical concerns of his fellow modernists, Burke challenged their disapproval of ordinary social communication and argued instead that modernists needed to work in and through the complications of language and not avoid them.”

¹⁷ Burke, , Towards a Better Life: Being a Series of Epistles, or Declamations (Berkeley, 1982 Google Scholar; first published 1932); Selzer, Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village, 179.

¹⁸ Hoeveler, J. David Jr, The New Humanism: A Critique of Modern America, 1900–1940 (Charlottesville, VA, 1977), 179 Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Burke, Kenneth, “Fides Quaerens Intellectum,” in Burke, Equipment for Living: The Literary Reviews of Kenneth Burke, ed. Rivers, Nathaniel A. and Weber, Ryan P. (West Lafayette, IN, 2010), 417–20, at 417 Google Scholar.

²⁰ Selzer, Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village, 40.

²¹ Burke, Kenneth, Counter-statement (Berkeley, 1968; first published 1931), 91 Google Scholar.

²² Selzer, Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village, 40–42.

²³ Burke to Windsor Quarterly, 10 July 1934, Burke Papers.

²⁴ Burke, Kenneth, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 2nd edn (Indianapolis, 1965; first published 1935), 49 Google Scholar.

²⁵ Burke, Attitudes toward History, 11.

²⁶ Burke to McKeon, 15 Oct. 1938, Burke Papers.

²⁷ Burke to Josephson, 17 Dec. 1921, quoted in Wess, Robert, “Burke's McKeon Side: Burke's Pentad and McKeon's Quartet,” in Selzer, Jack and Wess, Robert, eds., Kenneth Burke and His Circles (West Lafayette, IN, 2008), 49–67, at 50–51 Google Scholar, original emphasis.

²⁸ McKeon, Richard, The Philosophy of Spinoza: The Unity of His Thought (Woodbridge, CT, 1987; first published 1928), viiGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Burke to Josephson December 17, 1921 quoted in Wess, 50–51.

³⁰ McKeon, Richard, “Spiritual Autobiography,” in McKeon, , Freedom and History and Other Essays, ed. McKeon, Zahava K. (Chicago, 1990), 3–36, at 6, 7Google Scholar.

³¹ McKeon, Richard, “A Philosopher Meditates on Discovery,” in Selected Writings of Richard McKeon: Philosophy, Science, and Culture, ed. McKeon, Zahava K. and Swenson, William G., vol. 1 (Chicago, 1998), 41–60 Google Scholar, at 44–5; McKeon, “Spiritual Autobiography,” 7.

³² McKeon, “Spiritual Autobiography,” 7.

³³ Richard McKeon, “Three Philosophers of Art: Tolstoi, Croce, and Santayana” (master's thesis, Columbia University, 1920), 68.

³⁴ Ibid., 91.

³⁵ Ibid., 84.

³⁶ Ibid., 84.

³⁷ Ibid., 94.

³⁸ McKeon, “Spiritual Autobiography,” 33.

³⁹ Ibid., 6–7.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 7.

⁴¹ For an account of these debates see Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory.

⁴² For the institutional side of this story see Wilson, Daniel J., Science, Community, and the Transformation of American Philosophy, 1860–1930 (Chicago, 1990)Google Scholar; Reuben, Julie A., The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago, 1996), 133–75Google Scholar; Jewett, , “Canonizing Dewey: Naturalism, Logical Empiricism, and the Idea of American Philosophy,” Modern Intellectual History, 8, 1 (2011), 91–125 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a close analysis of the role these institutional and intellectual developments played in McKeon's graduate career at Columbia see Depew, David J., “Between Pragmatism and Realism: Richard McKeon's Philosophic Semantic,” in Garver, Eugene and Buchanan, Richard, eds., Pluralism in Theory and Practice: Richard McKeon and American Philosophy (Nashville, 2000), 29–53 Google Scholar.

⁴³ McKeon, “A Philosopher Meditates on Discovery,” 49.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 47.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 48, emphasis added.

⁴⁶ For Woodbridge's background see Kuklick, Bruce, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (Oxford, 2001), 190 Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ McKeon, “Spiritual Autobiography,” 8.

⁴⁸ McKeon, Richard, “The Empiricist and Experimentalist Temper in the Middle Ages: A Prolegomenon to the Study of Mediaeval Science,” in Essays in Honor of John Dewey: On the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, October 20, 1929 (New York, 1970 Google Scholar; first published 1929), 216–34, at 231.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 222.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 234.

⁵¹ McKeon, “A Philosopher Meditates on Discovery,” 49.

⁵² Ibid., 46.

⁵³ McKeon, “Spiritual Autobiography,” 14.

⁵⁴ For an account of McKeon's relation to the University of Chicago see Levine, Donald N., “Richard McKeon: Architecton of Human Powers,” in Levine, , Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America (Chicago, 2006), 91–113 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ For Burke's involvement at the Writers’ Congress see Aaron, Daniel, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York, 1961), 287–92Google Scholar. Burke's own conception of Marxism was like much the rest of his thought: idiosyncratic. Whereas many others came to Marxism for its claim to offer scientific laws of historical development, Burke saw just the opposite in the philosophy. Marxism's draw for him was in its ability to “replace the strictly scientific hopes for a neutral vocabulary by a new weighted vocabulary, which would be moral, or poetic.” Marxism, in other words, was an art, not a science, for Burke. This theme of Burke choosing art over science in the sphere of politics will come up again in the next two sections. Burke, Permanence and Change, 178.

⁵⁶ McKeon to Burke, 26 Nov. 1937, Burke Papers.

⁵⁷ The methodology of placing “[s]tress upon what kind of questions a critic should ask himself, what moments in a work he should expect to find particularly revealing of the author's motives, what kind of medicine the poet is concocting as equipment for living” that Burke worked out for the course formed the intellectual backbone of The Philosophy of Literary Form. Burke to McKeon, 3 Dec. 1937, Richard McKeon Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago (hereafter McKeon Papers); McKeon to Burke, 15 Dec. 1937, Burke Papers.

⁵⁸ Kenneth Burke, “Liberalism's Family Tree,” in Burke, Equipment for Living, 455–8, at 457.

⁵⁹ Kenneth Burke, “Intelligence as a Good,” in Burke, Equipment for Living, 439–44, at 440.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 444.

⁶¹ McKeon, Richard, “Process and Function,” in Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, vol. 1, 82–111, at 109 Google Scholar.

⁶² Hollinger, “The Defense of Democracy,” 95.

⁶³ Burke, Kenneth, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd edn (Berkeley, 1973 Google Scholar; first published 1941), 152.

⁶⁴ For the classical pragmatist's reliance upon scientific metaphors see Wilson, Science, Community, and the Transformation of American Philosophy; Hollinger, David A., “William James and the Culture of Inquiry,” in Hollinger, , In the American Provence: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Baltimore, 1985), 3–22 Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ See Westbrook, Robert, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 170 Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ For this paragraph, I have benefited from Wilson, Daniel J., who traces pragmatism's role in the rise of analytical philosophy in his “Pragmatism, Science, and Logical Positivism,” in Hollinger, Robert and Depew, David, eds., Pragmatism: From Progressivism to Postmodernism (Westport, CT, 1995), 122–41Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Somerville, John, “The Social Ideas of the Wiener Kreis's International Congress,” Journal of Philosophy, 33/11 (21 May 1936), 259–301, at 296 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁸ Cohen quoted in Wilson, “Pragmatism, Science, and Logical Positivism,” 136–7.

⁶⁹ Tensions between the two movements did, of course, exist. Indeed, pragmatists appeared more willing to paint logical positivism's insights favorably when it stood in the shadow of pragmatism rather than assess the merits of the philosophy on its own terms. See Jewett, “Canonizing Dewey.”

⁷⁰ See Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory; Smith, Social Science in the Crucible.

⁷¹ Cohen, Morris R. quoted in Hollinger, David A., Morris R. Cohen and the Scientific Ideal (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 201, 202Google Scholar.

⁷² See Hollinger, “The Defense of Democracy”; and Hollinger, “Science as a Weapon in the Kulturkämpfe in the United States during and after World War II,” in Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, 80–96,155–74; Smith, Social Science in the Crucible, 13–48.

⁷³ For a longer history of these hopes see Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University. For the efforts to create a naturalistic morality in the 1930s and 1940s, see also his “Canonizing Dewey.”

⁷⁴ Hook, Sidney, Reason, Social Myths and Democracy (New York, 1940), 295 Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 296.

⁷⁶ See Pollock, Ethan, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ See Proctor, Robert, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA, 1988)Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Richard McKeon, “Communication, Truth, and Society,” in McKeon, Freedom and History and Other Essays, 88–102, at 93. See also McKeon, , “Philosophic Differences and the Issues of Freedom,” Ethics, 61/2 (1951), 105–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁹ Richard McKeon, “Democracy, Scientific Method, and Action,” in Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, vol. 1, 335–93, at 338.

⁸⁰ For the contested and ambiguous nature of democracy in European politics at this time see Müller, Jan-Werner, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven, 2013)Google Scholar.

⁸¹ McKeon to Burke, 12 Dec. 1934, Burke Papers.

⁸² Burke, Permanence and Change, 177, original emphasis.

⁸³ Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 30, original emphasis.

⁸⁴ Burke, Attitudes toward History, 246.

⁸⁵ Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 29–31.

⁸⁶ McKeon, “Democracy, Scientific Method, and Action,” 337.

⁸⁷ McKeon later noted that the same ambiguity applied to the meaning of the “scientific method,” writing, “Scientific method is named in the singular, but formulations of scientific methods tend to be plural because they are applied in their use to different subject matters and problems.” Richard McKeon, “Philosophy and the Development of Scientific Methods,” in Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, vol. 1, 165–82, at 165.

⁸⁸ McKeon, “Democracy, Scientific Method, and Action,” 341.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 372.

⁹⁰ For an extended treatment of McKeon's philosophy of science see Walter Watson, “McKeon's Contributions to the Philosophy of Science,” Garver and Buchanan, Pluralism in Theory and Practice, 163–88.

⁹¹ Richard McKeon, “Dialogue and Controversy in Philosophy,” in McKeon, Freedom and History and Other Essays, 103–25, at 103.

⁹² McKeon, “Process and Function,” 111.

⁹³ Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 272.

⁹⁴ Burke, Permanence and Change, 66, original emphasis.

⁹⁵ McKeon, “Communication, Truth, and Society,” 97.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 98.

⁹⁷ Ibid., 99.

⁹⁸ Burke, Counter-statement, 143.

⁹⁹ Ibid., 105.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., viii.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 108.

¹⁰² Burke, Permanence and Change, 66, original emphasis.

¹⁰³ Kenneth Burke, “The Esthetic Strain,” in Burke, Equipment for Living, 563–6, at 565.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 566.

¹⁰⁵ Dewey had written extensively about the problems caused by splitting experience from nature in Experience and Nature. As for the phrase “spectator theory of truth,” Dewey used this throughout The Quest for Certainty to characterize the types of epistemology he opposed.

¹⁰⁶ McKeon, Richard, Thought, Action, and Passion (Chicago, 1954), 186 Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 187.

¹⁰⁸ Burke, Permanence and Change, 49.

¹⁰⁹ James, William, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Buffalo, NY, 1991; first published 1907), 26 Google Scholar; Burke, Kenneth, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, 1969; first published 1945), 74–7Google Scholar.

¹¹⁰ Burke, Permanence and Change, 86–7.

¹¹¹ As a sign of Burke's continued preoccupation with language's power to convert users, see his The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley, 1970; first published 1961).

¹¹² Burke, Permanence and Change, 263.

¹¹³ Ibid., 4, original emphasis.

¹¹⁴ McKeon, “The Flight from Certainty and the Quest for Precision,” in Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, vol. 1, 228–43, at 235. For McKeon's relation to the history of philosophy as a field in decline, see Richard Popkin, “Philosophy and the History of Philosophy,” in Garver and Buchanan, Pluralism in Theory and Practice, 1–9.

¹¹⁵ McKeon, “Philosophy and Method,” 205.

¹¹⁶ McKeon, , “Power and the Language of Power,” Ethics, 68/2 (Jan. 1952), 98–115, at 112 Google Scholar.

¹¹⁷ For the relation of McKeon's broad view of philosophy to other intellectual currents, see Eugene Garver, “Pluralism and the Virtues of Philosophy,” in Garver and Buchanan, Pluralism in Theory and Practice, 110–34.

¹¹⁸ McKeon, Richard, “The Philosophic Bases and Material Circumstances of the Rights of Man,” in UNESCO, ed., Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (New York, 1949), 23–34, at 23 Google Scholar.

¹¹⁹ Ibid., 24.

¹²⁰ McKeon called this mapping of intellectual traditions “semantic schematism”—creating blueprints of meaning for different philosophies as they evolved through time and engaged with one another. For the fullest and most condensed distillation of McKeon's semantic schematism, see Richard McKeon, “Philosophic Semantics and Philosophic Inquiry,” in McKeon, Freedom and History and Other Essays, 242–56. See also McKeon, Thought, Action, and Passion, 208. For McKeon's most extended application of these tools to ideological conflicts, see his Freedom and History: The Semantics of Philosophical Controversies and Ideological Conflicts (New York, 1952). Plochmann, George Kimball also provides an explication of this approach in his Richard McKeon: A Study (Chicago, 1990), 45–93 Google Scholar. Walter Watson builds on this concept as well as several others of McKeon's core ideas in his The Architectonics of Meaning: Foundations of the New Pluralism (Chicago, 1993).

¹²¹ Burke, Permanence and Change, xlvii.

¹²² Kenneth Burke, “Afterword to Second Edition,” in Burke, Attitudes toward History, 345–50, at 350.

¹²³ Burke, Attitudes toward History, xlviii.

¹²⁴ McKeon, Thought, Action, and Passion, 190.

¹²⁵ Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 110–11.

¹²⁶ Leitch, Vincent B., American Literary Criticism Since the 1930s, 2nd edn (New York, 2010), 36–7Google Scholar.

¹²⁷ McKeon, “Communication, Truth, and Society,” 89.

¹²⁸ Hepburn, Ronald W., “Review,” Philosophical Review, 64/2 (April 1955), 307–9, at 308 Google Scholar.

¹²⁹ Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Introduction, in Burke, Permanence and Change, xiii–xliv, at xv.

¹³⁰ Sidney, Hook, “The Technique of Mystification,” in Rueckert, William H., ed., Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, 1924–1966 (Minneapolis, 1969), 89–97, at 91 Google Scholar.

¹³¹ Ibid., 94.

¹³² Sidney Hook, “The Use and Abuse of Words,” review of Democracy in a World of Tensions: A Symposium Prepared by UNESCO, New Leader, 15 Oct. 1951, 20–21, at 20.

¹³³ Hook, “The Technique of Mystification,” 89.

¹³⁴ Alexander Sesonske, review of Thought, Action, and Passion, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 13/2 (Dec. 1954), 270–71, at 271.

¹³⁵ Burke to William H. Rueckert, 21 Feb. 1968, in Letters from Kenneth Burke to William H. Rueckert, 1959–1987, ed. William H. Rueckert (West Lafayette, IN, 2003), 134–5, at 135.

¹³⁶ McKeon to Burke, 27 Oct. 1934, Burke Papers.

¹³⁷ For characterizations of Burke and McKeon's thought that capture this trend see Leitch, American Literary Criticism since the 1930s, 35–9, 52–69; Conley, Thomas M., Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago, 1990), 268–77, 285–91Google Scholar.

¹³⁸ Frank Lentricchia makes this complaint in relation to Burke in his Criticism and Social Change (Chicago, 1985). Wayne Booth makes much the same point about McKeon in his introduction to Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, 2: 1–4.

¹³⁹ For Rorty's relation to McKeon see Gross, Neil, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago, 2009), 97, 118, 142–4, 164, 307, 316, 338Google Scholar.

¹⁴⁰ Rodgers, Daniel T., Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA, 2012)Google Scholar.

¹⁴¹ The difference between communication as a process of identification versus one of persuasion is a distinction that Burke developed extensively in his A Rhetoric of Motives.