LECTURE 1. An Introduction to Philosophic Problems
1. McKeon actually begins his lecture with a few comments regarding course changes in the College taking effect in the fall of 1963. In what follows below, “OMP” stands for “Organizations, Methods, and Principles of Knowledge,” a yearlong course which began as “Observation, Interpretation, and Integration,” known as OII (a difficult course, which campus humor soon dubbed as “Oi, Oi, Oi!”). OII was created to be the fourth-year philosophic capstone of the educational program in the “Hutchins” College of the 1940s. For a discussion of OII see William O’Meara’s account in The Idea and Practice of General Education: An Account of the College of the University of Chicago by Present and Former Members of the Faculty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), pp. 232–45 and 253–55, wherein he describes McKeon as “the principal author of the course, as regards both content and method” (p. 234fn.). McKeon begins the lecture here as follows:
MCKEON: With the changes occurring this fall, this course is now called Ideas and Methods 211. It used to be called 201. The change is due to the fact that, given the alteration both of time and circumstance and of the relation between this sequence and the OMP sequence, it seemed desirable, since both are changing in content, to change the name. The old OMP sequence is now 201–202–203, which will receive the old name of this sequence; this sequence is now 211–212–213. They are not related as prerequisites to each other; they’re related, rather, in that they approach the problems of philosophy in a similar way. The 201–202–203 sequence does it in terms of a succession of problems, that is, the problem of being or the problem of existence; in this sequence, we do it not by regions of problems but by the original location of problems.
2. In 1979, when asked about this point, McKeon replied that one example he was thinking of was from chemistry, where the combination of equal volumes of two different liquids does not necessarily produce a precisely double resultant volume.
3. McKeon is undoubtedly alluding to the Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), where Newton’s work appears in volume 34.
4. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962).
5. See, for instance, Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), pp. 804–6.
6. Volume VII in this series is Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1949).
7. While an assistant at the Royal Observatory in Paris from 1672 to 1679, the Danish astronomer Claus Roemer (1644–1710) made his initial discovery that light travels at a definite speed. Descartes had died earlier, in 1650.
8. At this point in his lecture McKeon makes a few comments about some of the course’s mechanics.
MCKEON: The readings will include a number of mimeographed sheets that I will pass out. I have a finite number of them; and, consequently, in passing them around, may I request the registered students to take them but the auditors to refrain. These are selections from Plato’s Timaeus, where we shall begin. I will give some more sheets out. We will eventually make use of three books which are in the bookstore: Galileo, The Two New Sciences (the Dover Press); Newton’s Philosophy of Nature (Hafner’s); James Clerk Maxwell, Matter and Motion (Dover Press). The course will meet three times a week. I will lecture, normally, on Wednesdays, including the next class. On Mondays and Fridays we will discuss the texts that have been assigned. Are there any questions? . . .
LECTURE 2. Philosophic Problems in the Natural Sciences
1. See Plato, Meno, 80a.
2. Figure 3 is not in Mitchell’s class notebook.
3. Figure 4 is not in Mitchell’s class notebook.
4. Although in 1963 McKeon did not cover Einstein in discussions, he did leave notes from discussions in earlier versions of the course which suggest something of the way he treated Einstein. See appendix F.
5. See C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University, 1959).
6. Alexius Meinong (1853–1920) was a professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Graz from 1882 until his death.
7. Table 1 is not in Mitchell’s class notebook.
8. A hoplite was a heavily armed Greek infantry soldier.
9. McKeon’s quotation regarding Gorgias’s conception of the character of scientific research is from the latter’s “Encomium to Helen,” par. 13. See The Older Sophists, ed. Rosamond Kent Sprague (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), p. 53. For a translation of Gorgias’s “On the Nonexistent or On Nature,” see The Older Sophists, pp. 43–46.
10. At this point in the lecture, McKeon discovers that he has run out of time, so he cuts short his lecture notes. Those notes show he has a few additional comments to make about the Sophists’ conception of space as well as a more extensive analysis of the effect of the four modes of thought on necessity and chance or probability. In addition, the notes contain four ideas of nature, which he condenses into the one paragraph that immediately follows. For those lecture notes, see appendix B.
11. L’être et le néant; essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943). Translated by Hazel E. Barnes as Being and Nothingness; An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).
12. Figure 6 is not in Mitchell’s class notebook.
DISCUSSION. Plato, Timaeus (Part 1)
1. The mimeographed selections handed out to the class for reading and discussion are sections 27d–37c, 57d–59d, and 88c–90d. Page references to Plato’s Timaeus will be to the Oxford edition cited in the Preface and, placed within brackets, will follow quotations. The mimeographed readings are based on the Oxford edition but reflect substantial revisions, probably by McKeon. Thus, a comparison of the quotations used in the discussion and the Oxford translation will reflect differences that reveal McKeon’s philosophic, as opposed to philologic, reading of an ancient text.
2. All students’ names have been changed, but each pseudonym has been used consistently throughout all the discussions so that, if one wishes, the reader may follow different patterns of thinking. Where it is not clear from the tape recording which student is speaking, the speaker is identified generically as Student.
3. Figure 7 is not in Mitchell’s class notebook.
4. McKeon’s official class list does not accurately represent who is attending this meeting, and a moment of confusion interrupts the discussion at this point:
MCKEON: Mr. Warren? Is Mr. Warren here? Maybe I ought to send another sheet of paper around. Since the machine got temperamental and decided that students have two weeks to make up their minds about registering, I have to run the course by making up a kind of a list of attendees as I go along.
5. The Divinity School at the University of Chicago was located in Swift Hall.
6. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality; An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 63.
7. Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann (1761–1819), German philosopher. See his Geschichte der Philosophie, 11 vols. (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1798–1819).
DISCUSSION. Plato, Timaeus (Part 2)
1. McKeon is referring to Snow’s argument in The Two Cultures (see lecture 2, endnote 5), which had become quite widely known, that the humanities and the natural sciences represented two different educations and cultures and that the inhabitants of each, especially those in the humanities, too often were ignorant of the simplest matters in the other culture. Humanists’ alleged ignorance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics figured prominently as an example in Snow’s argument.
2. The period of a “great year” is about 25,800 years.
3. Figure 8 is not in Mitchell’s class notebook.
DISCUSSION. Plato, Timaeus (Part 3)
1. This hour of discussion on October 11th is divided roughly in half between Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Physics. The second half of the day’s discussion appears with the other Aristotle discussions.
2. At this point McKeon runs through a number of names on the class list who are not present at the discussion.
MCKEON: Mr. Brannan? . . . He’s not here. Mr. Rogers? . . . Mr. Davis? . . . It can’t be that all my names are absent, can it?
3. McKeon’s particular use of the terms “dialectical” and “method” are developed both in lecture 3, which was actually delivered the class meeting prior to this third discussion of Plato, and in lecture 4. See appendix A.
LECTURE 3. Motion: Method
1. See, for instance, the last chapter, entitled “The Philosophy of Logical Analysis,” in Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), pp. 828–36.
2. McKeon is presumably referring here to Democritus.
3. Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature, trans. Clemens Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1940).
4. Percy W. Bridgman (1882–1961), an American physicist, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1946 for his work on high pressures.
5. In referring back to lecture 2, McKeon evidently thinks that he covered the different meanings not only of science and nature, which he did, but also of necessity and probability, which he did not, though they were in his notes for that lecture. See appendix B.
6. Table 2 is not in Mitchell’s class notebook.
7. Table 3 is not in Mitchell’s class notebook.
8. The Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago is a center for physics research named after Enrico Fermi, who, working in 1942 with uranium at Stagg Field, the university’s athletic stadium, produced the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.
9. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1938).
LECTURE 4. Motion: Method (Part 2) and Principle
1. The very beginning of this lecture is missing from the tape recording used for transcription. This first sentence, therefore, has been inserted to help orient the reader to the review of the previous lecture which follows. McKeon’s own words from the tape begin with the second sentence.
2. Table 4 is not in Mitchell’s class notebook.
3. The Way to Wisdom; An Introduction to Philosophy, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Gollancz, 1951).
4. Table 5 is not in Mitchell’s class notebook.
5. See John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (New York: Dover, 1959), book II.
6. Karl Popper (1902– ), Austrian philosopher of natural and social science. The second name is hard to hear on the tape, and it is not clear whom McKeon means by “Weissman.”
DISCUSSION. Aristotle, Physics (Part 1)
1. Here begins the second half of the hour discussion which began with McKeon’s concluding analysis of Plato’s Timaeus. Page references to Aristotle’s Physics will be to the Oxford edition cited in the Preface and, placed within brackets, will follow quotations.
2. See Chapters 3–6 [194b16–198a13].
DISCUSSION. Aristotle, Physics (Part 2)
[No notes.]
DISCUSSION. Aristotle, Physics (Part 3)
1. Christian Huygens (1629–95), Dutch mathematician and astronomer. His Dioptrica was first published in 1653. See his Oeuvres complètes publiées par la Société hollandaise des sciences (La Haye: Nijhoff, 1888–1950), t. 13, Dioptrique.
2. The Oxford translation reads: “we can define motion as the fulfilment of the movable qua movable, the cause of the attribute being contact with what can move."
3. Known as the “IC,” the Illinois Central Railroad is the most direct connection between the University in Hyde Park and downtown Chicago, where there is a Van Buren Street stop.
4. See book III, chapters 4–8 [202b30–208a25].
LECTURE 5. Motion: Interpretation
1. Edmund Ware Sinnott, Cell and Psyche; The Biology of Purpose (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina, 1950).
2. In 1948 Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Fred Hoyle propounded a version of the steady-state theory of the universe. In the same year, George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Hans Bethe argued against this theory in a paper developing the idea of an expanding universe, an early form of the “big bang” theory widely accepted today.
3. See Aristotle discussion, part 2.
4. For a brief sketch of the other two positions, that is, construction and discrimination, developed in a manner that does not mix modes of thought and represented by Democritus and the Sophists, see appendix C. Also see lecture 7, figure 22.
5. At this point in the lecture, McKeon interrupts himself with the following aside:
MCKEON: Let me make an announcement I must make. Our next lecture will not be next Wednesday; I shall be out of town. It will be a week from Wednesday. All of the discussion meetings will take place. I will be out of town only for that date; Friday and Monday are unaffected.
DISCUSSION. Galileo, Two New Sciences (Part 1)
1. Page references to Galileo’s Dialogues will be to the Dover edition cited in the Preface and, placed within brackets, will follow quotations.
2. McKeon previously gave some suggestions on how to go about reading Galileo. See above, the discussion of Aristotle, part 3, the beginning.
3. See below, the discussion of Galileo, part 2, where McKeon discusses these complex figures.
4. Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Austrian physicist and philosopher, first published a work on Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus) in 1883. See his The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development, 5th ed., trans. Thomas J. McCormack (La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1942).
DISCUSSION. Galileo, Two New Sciences (Part 2)
1. McKeon formally begins this class period by checking the names on his official class list with members of the class.
2. The preceding interchange between McKeon and Dean is very difficult to hear on the tape.
3. McKeon is evidently translating, as he often did, ex tempore from the Italian original. The Crew and de Salvio translation at the bottom of page 161 reads as follows: “And thus, it seems, we shall not be far wrong if we put the increment of speed as proportional to the increment of time . . . “
4. See above, the discussion of Galileo, part 1, endnote 4.
5. This student response is conjectural because the voice on the tape is indistinct.
DISCUSSION. Galileo, Two New Sciences (Part 3)
1. See the scholium on pages 180–85.
2. Figure 19 is taken directly from page 171 of the Galileo text.
3. Several of McKeon’s immediately preceding interchanges with students are very difficult to hear on the tape and are only approximated in the text.
4. Figure 20 is taken directly from page 170 of the Galileo text.
5. In the discussion of the differences between Sagredo’s and Salviati’s approaches, the interchanges between McKeon and students are frequently indecipherable on the tape. Thus, the preceding section reflects substantial editing of comments in an attempt to keep the general sense of McKeon’s development of this passage.
DISCUSSION. Galileo, Two New Sciences (Part 4)
1. McKeon pulls out to use the list of students who signed up the first day of class rather than the University’s official, computer-generated list of students enrolled.
2. Figure 21 is not in Mitchell’s class notebook. McKeon’s comments indicate that at this point he puts on the blackboard something similar to this figure and obviously related to Galileo’s figure 51 on page 181.
3. See the beginning of part 3 of the discussion of Galileo, including endnote 1.
1. McKeon is interrupted at this point in his lecture and turns to his audience for assistance as follows:
MCKEON: I hear a bell ringing; I’m worried about the time. What time do the rest of you have? I have 3 o’clock. Am I slow?
STUDENT: We have 3:15.
MCKEON: Quarter past? Well, we’re still on motion; we’re not on time. [L!]
2. Willard Van Orman Quine (1908– ), American professor of philosophy.
LECTURE 7. Selection (Part 2)
1. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court, 1925).
2. See lecture 3.
3. For a discussion of Lebenswelt, “life-world,” see Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology; An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University, 1970).
4. New York: Minton, Balch and Co., 1929.
5. Lecture 7 actually was delivered after the first two discussions on Newton had taken place. See appendix A.
6. In referring to his lecture notes, McKeon discovers that the diagram he put on the board earlier may be confusing. He corrects it, saying: “I find in looking at my notes—I have two different lectures here—that sometimes I’ve put the arrowhead in the one direction, sometimes in the other.” This text has regularized the diagrams so that the arrowheads all point to the term which is basic.
7. For a brief examination of Democritus and the Sophists in this context, which is connected to the earlier discussion that concludes lecture 5 on the “pure” modes of thought used by Plato and Aristotle, see appendix C.
DISCUSSION. Newton, Principia Mathematica (Part 1)
1. Part 1 of the discussion of Newton actually preceded lecture 6 (see appendix A).
2. Page references to Newton’s Principia Mathematica will be to the Hafner edition cited in the Preface and, placed within brackets, will follow quotations.
3. This name is hard to hear on the tape, and it is not clear to whom McKeon is referring.
4. The following ellipsis reflects two brief comments by McKeon and a short response by Wilcox which are inaudible on the tape and are omitted here.
DISCUSSION. Newton, Principia Mathematica (Part 2)
1. Part 2 of the discussion of Newton actually preceded lecture 7 (see appendix A). McKeon begins this day’s discussion with a short statement.
MCKEON: Let me make an announcement before we begin. I have to attend another meeting that is paramount on Monday, so there’ll be no class next time. I will lecture on Wednesday, however, and the next assignment is for Friday.
2. See his “On the Method of Theoretical Physics” in Albert Einstein, The World As I See It, trans. Alan Harris (New York: Covici Friede, 1934), pp. 30–40.
DISCUSSION. Newton, Principia Mathematica (Part 3)
1. See Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1910).
DISCUSSION. Newton, Principia Mathematica (Part 4)
1. Figure 26 is taken directly from page 27 of the Newton text.
DISCUSSION. Newton, Principia Mathematica (Part 5)
1. These three questions addressed to Marovski represent a condensation of several interchanges that are inaudible on the tape recording of this discussion.
2. Newton studied under Henry More (1614–87), one of the Cambridge Platonists.
3. Given his respect for Aristotle’s contributions, McKeon is undoubtedly being ironic here.
LECTURE 8. Space: Method, Interpretation, and Principle
1. See lecture 2 and figure 5.
2. Table 11 is not in Mitchell’s class notebook.
3. McKeon interrupts himself here and indicates that this passage is not in the mimeographed pages handed out to students at the beginning of the course: “I don’t think I’ve passed out that page yet; we will read it.” See Timaeus, 50a–c.
4. See lecture 2, endnote 6. Meinong studied under the German philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano (1838–1917) at the University of Vienna from 1875 through 1878. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the German phenomenologist, was also a student of Brentano’s, from 1884–86.
5. McKeon’s audience in 1963 is accustomed to working without air-conditioning in the University’s main library, at that time the unrefurbished Harper Library.
6. See lecture 2.
7. See the discussion of Newton, part 4.
8. See lecture 6.
9. McKeon starts to use Galileo as an example but then remembers he is doing discrimination in interpretation, not method:
MCKEON: When Galileo, for example—I’m sorry, I can’t use Galileo, he didn’t have an existentialist interpretation; it’s a question, then, of Galileo not only having an operational method but an existentialist interpretation.
10. The essay McKeon is referring to is unknown. For one of his treatments of matter, however, see his “Hegel’s Conception of Matter” in The Concept of Matter, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1963), pp. 421–25 and 428–29, plus his discussion of other conceptions of matter on pp. 75–78, 140–42, 242, and 570–72.
LECTURE 9. Time: Method, Interpretation, and Principle
1. Table 12 is not in Mitchell’s class notebook.
2. See lecture 2.
3. See part 3 of the discussion of Newton and endnote 1.
4. Newton, Principia Mathematica, book I, definition VIII, scholium, section 1 [17].
5. Alexander Koyré (1892–1964), Russian-born historian of science and philosophy. McKeon is presumably referring to Koyre’s Etudes Galiléennes (Paris: Hermann, 1939). See Koyre’s Galileo Studies, trans. John Mepham (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978).
6. Fr. Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), French Catholic priest and natural philosopher. For an account of the debate over Galileo’s inclined plane experiment, see Alexander Koyré, “An Experiment in Measurement,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 97 (1953), pp. 222–37.
7. See part 3 of the discussion of Aristotle, endnote 1.
8. Timaeus, 37d.
9. McKeon closes his lecture with some brief comments about finishing the course, based on a notice in the Maroon, the University’s student-run newspaper.
MCKEON: Well, next time is the last meeting. The various lectures I have missed makes it hard to know whether I will speak about cause next time or resume all in a final summary. If you haven’t been reading the Maroon carefully, you may not have noticed that the final examination of Ideas and Methods is on Monday, December 9th, and it’s not held here or at this time. It’s held in Cobb 101 from 9:30 to 11:30. I have not yet heard from any of the officials of the University, but the Maroon seems to be clear and precise on this.
STUDENT: Will we be discussing the book on Friday?
MCKEON: Yes. According to my little date book, Thursday [Thanksgiving] is a holiday but Friday isn’t.
DISCUSSION. Maxwell, Matter and Motion (Part 1)
1. McKeon starts the class by describing the final examination in the course. Some of his remarks are missing from the tape, and those that are taped are mostly inaudible. In what is audible, he says, “There will be two questions; each question will be one hour.” For examples of his final exam, see appendix G.
2. Page references to Maxwell’s Matter and Motion will be to the Dover edition cited in the Preface and, placed within brackets, will follow quotations. Maxwell’s Preface appears on page [v].
3. See lecture 2, endnote 5; also part 2 of the discussion of Plato, endnote 1.
4. In what follows, McKeon develops the historical aspect of selection first presented in lecture 7.
5. This last pair of comments, by McKeon and Marovski, are unclear on the tape.
6. Figure 27 is taken directly from figure 1 on page 5 of Maxwell’s text.
DISCUSSION. Maxwell, Matter and Motion (Part 2)
1. Mandel Hall is a small auditorium on the University of Chicago campus.
2. McKeon frequently joins this example of gold, which actually appears in Plato, to Descartes’s own example of wax. See the discussions of space in lecture 2 and lecture 8.
3. The responses by Frankl and Marovski at this point are indecipherable on the tape and have been omitted.
4. A brief exchange between Marovski and McKeon, indecipherable on the tape, is omitted here.
LECTURE 10. Summary: Interpretation, Method, and Principle
1. For lecture notes suggesting something of the way McKeon treated cause in earlier versions of this course, see appendix D.
2. See McKeon’s earlier treatment of this distinction between theoretic, practical, and productive sciences in lecture 2 leading up to figure 3.
3. As McKeon puts it in his lecture notes, “Cause is the action required to initiate or imagine the change, a variable added by the knower to the measurement of the event.” For the complete set of lecture notes for lecture 10, see appendix E.
4. For McKeon’s completion of the summary of the entitative interpretation of motion, space, time, and cause, see his lecture notes in appendix E.
5. For McKeon’s completion of the summary of the ontological interpretation of motion, space, time, and cause, see his lecture notes in appendix E.
6. McKeon’s lecture notes add that time is “a natural regular motion” and that the “cause of motion [is] preexistent motion.” See appendix E.
7. This name is hard to hear on the tape, and it is not clear to whom McKeon is referring.
8. As McKeon’s lecture notes make clear, the two preceding sentences refer, respectively, to interpretation and to method.
9. Figure 28 is from Mitchell’s notebook. The terms in parentheses, however, have been added from McKeon’s lecture notes. See appendix E.
10. McKeon ends the lecture with an exhortation to the students as they study for their final exam. He hopes “that you have a happy time between now and Monday when you will tell me about it.”
DISCUSSION. Review
1. That is, in his Physics. See the discussion of method in lecture 10.
2. A brief interchange between Davis and McKeon at this point is indecipherable on the tape and is omitted here.
3. See lecture 6.
4. See lecture 5, endnote 1.
5. Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (New York: Macmillan, 1945).
6. D’Arcy W. Thompson’s translation of Aristotle’s Historia Animalium is volume 4 in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D Ross (Oxford: Calrendon, 1910).
7. McKeon is presumably referring to Thompson’s frequently republished On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1917).
8. After separating from his wife, George Henry Lewes lived with the English novelist George Eliot (the pen name for Marian Evans) from 1854 until his death in 1878. He published Aristotle: A Chapter from the History of Science, Including Analyses of Aristotle’s Writings (London: Smith, Elder, 1864).
9. A Greek philosopher (fl. 200 B.C.) who was a celebrated commentator on Aristotle. Possibly McKeon is referring to his Quaestiones naturales, morales et de fato. For a two-volume translation of this work, the first of which has already been published, see Alexander’s Quaestiones 1.1–2.15, trans. R. W. Sharpies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1992).
10. Figure 29 is not in Mitchell’s class notebook.
11. Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749–1827), French astronomer and mathematician. See his The System of the World, trans. Henry H. Harte (London: Longmans, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830).
12. McKeon’s concluding remarks to the class involve the final examination the next week.
MCKEON: I hope you all have a good time next Monday. Let me remind you if you don’t get up early, it starts at 9:30, I’m told, and runs from 9:30 to 11:30. And if you’ll recall, there’ll be two questions: one from what we are talking about; and the other about new problems. For the new problems, I will use the material that I gave out to you; but if you have not read the material it doesn’t make any difference. I have sometimes in the past given the second question in the form of a quotation that I put down on the paper, and I’ll do the same this time. In other words, those of you who happen to have read carefully the selection that the quotation is from will not have an advantage over those who happen to have been careful about another selection. You will be able to use whatever you have in whatever ways you want with respect to the question I will ask about the selection. And if it is the first time you have seen it, don’t panic because it is highly probable that you won’t recognize it, but I can assure you that it comes from the mimeographed pages I handed out. Are there any questions?
STUDENT: Did you say the selection will be on time and space?
MCKEON: It will be on time and space since all the material that I gave you was on time and space. But this means you can bring in motion and cause, though you don’t have to.
(For examples of McKeon’s final examination questions, see appendix G.)
APPENDIX A. Class Schedule
1. This schedule of class meetings is based on actual classes held and topics covered. It has been reconstructed from comments in the tape recordings and laid out to reflect the typical McKeon syllabus. An actual syllabus from this class has not been located.
APPENDIX B. Selected Lecture Notes on Necessity, Probability, and Nature
1. The lecture notes that follow were originally prepared for the previous version of “Concepts and Methods: The Natural Sciences,” the seventh in the series McKeon gave on that topic and the last to be listed as I&M 201, which was given in autumn of 1961. In the notes McKeon typed up for the 1963 version, he explicitly states, “Insert Con. and Meth. 201 (VII),” and then refers to the following notes for completing lecture 2. Those 1961 lecture notes are here laid out and reproduced as typed, with any changes being noted in brackets, except for a few regularizations of spelling, which are not noted.
APPENDIX C. Selected Lecture Notes on Democritus and the Sophists
1. The lecture notes that follow were originally prepared as lecture 6 for the previous version of “Concepts and Methods: The Natural Sciences,” which was given in autumn of 1961. They are obviously the basis of the 1963 version’s lecture 5 up to the last paragraph. Since McKeon ran out of time before he could finish speaking from these notes, the conclusion of them is presented here. They are here laid out and reproduced as typed, with any changes being noted in brackets, except for a few regularizations of spelling, which are not noted.
APPENDIX D. Selected Lecture Notes on Cause
1. What follows is two sheets of lecture notes whose titles (and content) suggest something of the way McKeon treated “cause” in his natural sciences course, although he does not do so in an extended fashion in the 1963 version. A full lecture on cause for this course has not been found, but the position of the two sheets among his lecture notes indicates that he may have used them for an ex tempore development in earlier versions of the course. They are here laid out and reproduced as typed, with any changes being noted in brackets, except for a few regularizations of spelling, which are not noted.
2. “Methodic” is obviously an earlier term for “phenomenal” interpretations. In this section on interpretation in his notes, McKeon has also crossed out earlier terms and penciled in those used throughout the 1963 course: Entitative has replaced “Elemental,” Existential has replaced “Efficient,” and Essentialist has replaced “Causal.”
3. This entire last section on four kinds of cause has a large pencilled “X” through it.
APPENDIX E. Complete Lecture Notes For Lecture 10
1. What follows are the complete lecture notes McKeon prepared for the last lecture of the 1963 course. They are typed on three separate sheets, numbered sequentially, and are entitled, “Concepts and Methods 211, Summary.” They are here laid out and reproduced as typed, with any changes being noted in brackets, except for a few regularizations of spelling, which are not noted.
APPENDIX F. Discussion Notes for Einstein
1. These notes were found with others which formed the basis of the discussion of the five authors read in the 1963 version of the course. They are included here to suggest the kind of approach McKeon used when working with Einstein in earlier versions of the course. They are composed of three sheets, the first entitled, “Concepts and Methods. Einstein[,] Essays in Science,” (two sheets) and the second entitled, “Concepts and Methods 201. Einstein[,] What is the theory of relativity?” (a single sheet). They are here laid out and reproduced as typed, with any changes being noted in brackets, except for a few regularizations of spelling, which are not noted. The page references contained in the notes are presumably to the typed, mimeographed selections of the author which McKeon frequently handed out to the class.
2. Albert Einstein, Essays in Science, trans. Alan Harris (New York: Philosophical Library, 1934).
3. For this essay, see Essays in Science, pp. 28–39.
4. An earlier term for phenomenal interpretations. See appendix D, endnote 2.
5. For this essay, see Essays in Science, pp. 53–60.
APPENDIX G. Final Examinations
1. These two examinations, the final and the make-up, were found in McKeon’s files with other materials related to the natural sciences course. They are reproduced here exactly as mimeographed for the students.
APPENDIX H. Schema of Philosophic Semantics
1. This complete semantic schematism, which includes the column of “Selections,” is reprinted from the posthumously published paper entitled “Philosophic Semantics and Philosophic Inquiry,” which McKeon delivered at the Illinois Philosophy Conference held at Carbondale, Illinois, on February 26, 1966. This paper had been previously reproduced and distributed among his students and colleagues. See Richard McKeon, Freedom and History and Other Essays, ed. Zahava K. McKeon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 242–56. The schematism appears on page 253.