McKeon Center: We Foster Ways of Thinking

About Richard McKeon and his Legacy

Born in 1900, McKeon studied philosophy under Etienne Gilson and John Dewey. He was a scholar of classical and medieval thought. He wrote extensively on literature and literary criticism, the history of 19th and 20th-century physics, and philosophers such as Plato, Averroes, Avicenna, John Stuart Mill, and the Indian philosopher Ashoka.

Appointed by Robert Maynard Hutchins in 1935, McKeon became the dean of Humanities at the University of Chicago the following year and played a vital role in structuring the Core curriculum. Over the next four decades, his students included notable figures such as Susan Sontag, Richard Rorty, Wayne Booth, Eugene Garver and Paul Rabinow. His papers are available through the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center at the UChicago Library.

Eager to revitalize philosophy as the basis for categorizing ideas and methods, McKeon transformed the philosophical framework to develop new ways of thinking. Drawing from Plato, Democritus, the Sophists, and Aristotle, he created four modes of liberal arts thinking: dialectics, grammar, rhetoric, and logic. These modes shaped the classical and medieval curriculum and later became central to his renowned course, Ideas and Methods. In the 1960s, this course focused on the natural sciences by defining “space,” “time,” “motion,” and “cause” as four fundamental categories in the history of physics. The course explored works such as Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Physics, alongside scientific writings by Einstein, Galileo, Newton, and Maxwell. McKeon analyzed the “method,” “interpretation,” and “principle” used by these thinkers to construct systems explaining “space,” “time,” “motion,” and “cause.” When applying this framework to the Social Sciences, he used the terms “freedom,” “power,” and “history,” examining the works of Hobbes, Spinoza, Machiavelli, Mill, and Kant.