By Mark Backman

Works in Progress —

"Productive Ambiguity: Rereading Richard McKeon" (2026) explores how McKeon's work may be appropriate to the problems of our time and the disciplines we need to invent—or reinvent—to address them.

"Yes and No: Revisiting Peter Abailard, Sic et Non: A Critical Edition by Richard McKeon and Blanche Boyer" (2025)

"Making Sense of AI: Technology, Philology, and History" (2026)

"The Art of the Artificial: Richard McKeon, Philology, and the Future of the Humanities in the Age of AI" (2026)

Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery by Richard McKeon (1987)

Sophistication: Rhetoric and the Rise of Self-Consciousness (1991)

Ghost Writ: The Desert Wells Dialogues of Gilmartin Jacobsen—a fugue (2015)

Productive Ambiguity: Rereading Richard McKeon (2026)

I. McKeon Redux

II. Philology and Philosophic Ambiguity

III. The Ambiguities of Logos

IV. Abelard's Productive Ambiguity

V. From Abelard to AI

Time has been unkind to Richard McKeon. Once a force to be reckoned with at the University of Chicago, McKeon and his work are now largely forgotten despite the best efforts of a dwindling number of former colleagues and students. But though he may now be ignored he was in some ways ahead of his time for reasons seldom noted by his admirers or critics. He demonstrated in his writing and teaching how we can come to terms with ambiguity, contradiction, and uncertainty in a culture disrupted by communal strife, verbal and technological ingenuity, and competing claims about the truth.

Productive Ambiguity, I-IV

NB: changes inevitable

I-IV Productive Ambiguity.pdf

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Yes and No: Revisiting Peter Abailard, Sic et Non: A Critical Edition by Richard McKeon and Blanche Boyer (2025)

A typewritten manuscript among the Richard McKeon Papers archived at the University of Chicago Library raises interesting questions about Peter Abailard, Sic et Non: A Critical Edition, published in the 1970s by McKeon and Blanche Boyer. Some of these questions concern the publishing history of the book and require further research in the archived correspondence at the University of Chicago Press. But other questions emerge from the Critical Edition itself, the culmination of a 30-year project to produce the definitive text of Abelard’s 12th century treastise. They suggest an alternative role for the Critical Edition in the later debate among medievalists sparked by articles in Speculum 65 (1990) about “new” and “old” philology. They imply a complex relationship between the early-12th century thinker and McKeon’s late-20th century ideas about textual interpretation, systematic disambiguation, and philosophic pluralism. And they confirm the provisional, propaedeutic nature of the task that serious minds undertake in any age when they seek to define, clarify, and adapt what is new to what is known or believed to be true.

Text

Revisiting the Critical Edition.pdf

Context

Notes Revisiting the Critical Edition.pdf

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Making Sense of AI: Reconsidering Richard McKeon's Views on Technology, Philology, and History (2026)

Can Richard McKeon help us make sense of artificial intelligence? The question emerged, paradoxically, during the investigation of an unpublished essay by McKeon on Peter Abelard’s tract Sic et Non (Yes and No) and its influence on textual analysis in the 12th century, when inquisitive minds argued about the interpretation of an ultimately unknowable divine intelligence.(1) McKeon considers Abelard an important figure in an alternative history of Western philosophy rooted in conflicting ideas about the nature of language and reality. In numerous essays written over five decades, he describes the interplay of methods, subject matters, and disciplines that characterize different epochs in Western culture as periods of continuity or change.(2) The development of systematic textual interpretation in the 12th century is a case in point since it draws on various philological theories and practices reformulated in late antiquity from ancient Greek and Roman sources. McKeon realized that the resulting medieval innovations suggest a vocabulary, analytic scheme, and organizational structure that subsequently recur in Western philology and philosophy, arriving in the 20th century in various guises as modes of thought and expression.(3) This paper builds on McKeon’s insight in order to make sense of AI in the 21st century by focusing on three essays that came to fruition near the end of his life.

The Art of the Artificial: Richard McKeon, Philology, and the Future of the Humanities in the Age of AI (2026)

The 20th century philosopher Richard McKeon understood that the present epoch was going to be defined by verbal and technological ingenuity, novel forms of communication, ersatz audiences, instantaneous dissemination, and immediate reaction. And though he could not foresee the rise of artificial intelligence, his view of technology (and of technologizing) provides a framework for understanding how AI shapes and revalues textual expression. That framework begins with a reconfiguration of three linguistic arts that are the sources in one way or another of modern philology. From them, McKeon invents a unique approach to analyzing, articulating, and reconciling contested interpretations of reality that could help revitalize humanistic education in the 21st century.

Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery by Richard McKeon (1987)

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.

Introduction: Richard McKeon and the Renaissance of Rhetoric

The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts
Creativity and the Commonplace
Discourse, Demonstration, Verification, and Judgment
The Methods of Rhetoric and Philosophy: Invention and Judgment
Symbols, Myths, and Arguments
Philosophy of Communication and the Arts
Rhetoric in the Middle Ages
Poetry and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century: The Renaissance of Rhetoric
A Philosopher Meditates on Discovery

Amazon

Rhetoric Essays Invention Discovery.pdf

(16MB)

Left-click a title in the Table of Contents to go to the chapter. Left-click the Chapter Title to return to Table of Contents.

Sophistication: Rhetoric and the Rise of Self-Consciousness (1991)

Our digitized technological culture is controlled by five principles of language and reality that were first enunciated during the fifth century BCE in the city-states of Greece as the basis of the art of rhetoric:

Words are tools
Images are real
Information is power
Change is inevitable
Truth is relative

These rhetorical principles are expressed in conflicting concepts of history, politics, education, ethics, and aesthetics. They invest our art and literature with the archetypal themes and symbols that portray rudimentary emotions. And they influence the fundamental concepts and methods of our political, cultural, and educational institutions. Yet, as recent history demonstrates, the sophistication of our culture is a Faustian bargain affecting all the realms of self-consciousness, self-expression, and self-realization.

Amazon

Sophistication.pdf

(8.4MB)

Left-click a title in the Table of Contents to go to the chapter. Left-click the Chapter Title to return to Table of Contents.

Ghost Writ: The Desert Wells Dialogues of Gilmartin Jacobsen—a fugue (2015)

This book concerns one month in the life of the late Gilmartin Jacobsen, when he donated and delivered his library to our alma mater, Desert Wells College—a very exclusive, very remote, all-male two-year institution he attended in the late 1960s, on the border of California and Nevada near Death Valley. During our long hours together, we talked about his life, intellectual interests, and work. With no firm plan in mind, but thinking it might prove useful in the future, I digitally recorded our conversations, several of his encounters with some of the faculty and students, and a seminar he conducted. Shortly before leaving, he gave me a box filled with what he called the 'detritus' of his intellect and asked me 'to make something of it' if I could: a trove of unpublished essays, unfinished poems, fragments of a memoir, letters, emails, reviews, even handwritten notes on the back of ATM receipts. Ghost Writ is the "something" I've made of it—Joshua Cryst

Thema

Now & Then
Yes & No
How & Why
By & For
You & I

Coda

ghostwrit.net

Ghost Writ.pdf

(17.8MB)

Left-click a title in the Table of Contents to go to the chapter or section. Left-click any page number to return to Table of Contents.

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