Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery

The essays of Richard McKeon have long circulated piecemeal among scholars who see him as the leading twentieth-century philosopher and historian of rhetoric. This volume brings together McKeon's seminal works in rhetoric and philosophy, and vividly demonstrates the basis for this extraordinary reputation. | In his pursuit of rhetoric's fundamental qualities, McKeon ventures far beyond the traditional notion of rhetoric as simply a verbal art of persuasion. He details a history in which rhetoric functions as a tool for creating disciplines, arts, systems, and methods. Expression has always been an important element of rhetoric, but rhetoric also can serve as an organizational principle that provides the framework within which we can reveal and arrange the significant parts of any human understanding. | Given the prodigious range of McKeon's intellectual curiosity, his longtime and pervasive interest in rhetoric suggests the unique place he assigns it in the scheme of humanistic art