Richard McKeon presented the most fully developed version of his semantic schema in the Paul Carus Lectures of December 1965 and in "Philosophie Semantics and Philosophie Inquiry," a paper given at Southern Illinois University in March 1966. (..) The earliest form of the semantic schema is to be found in "Thomas Aquinas' Doctrine of Knowledge and Its Historical Setting" (1928). (..) McKeon's semantic publications from 1936 to 1943 are primarily occupied with the contrast between Plato and Aristotle. (..) "Aristotle's Conception of the Development and the Nature of Scientific Method" (1947). In this article the method of Aristotle is systematically contrasted not only to the method of Piato but also to the method of Democritus. The new threefold distinction of methods - dialectical, logistic, and inquiry - together with their corresponding principles - comprehensive, simple, and reflexive - is presented in "Philosophy and Method" (1951). (..) The semantic schema and the archic matrix: the schema schematizes philosophies as verbal expressions. The perspective is disciplinary : the schema is a schema of principles that are a priori in the sense that they are principles by which facts are constituted rather than principles the choice among which can be decided by an appeal to the facts. The interpretation is essentialist: the principles are the internal determinants of what the philosophies are as essential kinds. The method is operational: assignments of semantic profiles are justified by their consequences. (..) because the schema distinguishes principles by which the facts are constituted, their influence pervades all the details of a philosophy. (..) The columns or variables of McKeon's semantic schema relate, as was said, to the sequence of subjects in Aristotle's Organon - terms, propositions, syllogisms, and principles - whereas the columns or variables of the archic matrix relate to the sequence of subjects in Aristotle's Metaphysics - man, being, form, and activ- ity. (..) rediscovery in some form of Aristotle's four causes, for the causes are the archetypal set of reciprocally prior starting points for the self-determination of functioning wholes. Each of the causes is a cause of the whole that they determine, and not merely of a part of it. Each of the causes can therefore subordinate the others to itself . They are thus in a relation of reciprocai priority to each other - each is prior to all the others. We see that philosophies also stand in this relation of reciprocai priority to each other - each is prior to all the others. (..) discussion of different profiling (McK - W) of Descartes, Pierce, Hegel, Kant (..) I hâve argued that certain of McKeon's attributions of semantic elements to particular philosophers need revision. It should be noted that McKeon himself did not treat his attributions as fixed and unalterable; he was notorious for shifting his semantic interpretation of particular authors. (..) McKeon, however, did not admit to making mistakes. He always maintained that if properly understood all his readings were justified and consistent with one another. (..) It should be added, however, that one of the paradoxes of McKeon's thought is that though he holds that there is no "correct" interpretation of any text, his own interpretations are based on an extraordinarily careful textual analysis of the sort that one would expect if McKeon were trying to determine the "correct" meaning of the text. (..) The archic difference between myself and McKeon is relevant. His method is agonistic or rhetorical, mine resolutive. For the resolutive method the text does have a determinate structure, and the assignment of profiles to texts is justified by the fit between the schema as form and the texts as matter. For neither method, however, is the assignment of semantic profiles to texts the proper end of semantic Schemata: they are devices for inquiry, not taxonomy. (..) McKeon's method places determinateness wholly on the side of the inquirer or interpreter and not at all on the side of the world or the text. There is therefore from my point of view a great inconsistency in McKeon's approach. In the shift from inquiry to semantics a textual determinateness that McKeon himself recognizes seems to vanish into thin air, for the author in inquiry, according to McKeon, makes use of a definite profile in accordance with which the text is constituted, but when an interpreter cornes to read the text, it no longer has any profile of its own. (..) From my point of view an unfortunate consequence of McKeon's use of the operational method is that it tends to corrupt the meanings of the semantic schema itself. (..) The consequence of denying determinate structures to the texts is that the schema itself loses all determinate meaning. (..) McKeon's method and the resolutive method have opposite virtues. McKeon's method, by denying correctness to any interpretation, has the virtue of opening up new possibilities and of liberating us from unwarranted stereotypes and commonplaces. (..) The formulations of the resolutive method, in contrast, are independent of the particular mind that produces them and can be shared and used by many minds and thus constitute a cumulative tradition. |