Richard McKeon is looked upon as an erudite historian of ideas and exegete of philosophic texts. However, the originality and scope of his achievement as a systematic philosopher are less widely known. In this three-volume edition, of which this is the first, a selection of McKeon's writings is collected to show his distinctive approach to the analysis of discourse. This volume covers philosophic theory through his writings on first philosophy (metaphysics) and the methods and principles of the sciences, Volume II examines philosophic arts through his writings on aesthetics and forms of discourse as a whole, and Volume III looks at philosophic practice through his writings on world community and the relations of cultures. The books cover topics that range from philosophic semantics to the processes of the sciences to the forms of human rights. This collection makes McKeon's mission as a philosopher unmistakable. He characterized himself as a philosophic pluralist; he was an American philosopher in the tradition of the pragmatists, one whose philosophy subtly resonates with C.S. Peirce and John Dewey. McKeon also explored the themes of deconstructionism and other late-20th-century philosophies decades before their popular emergence, but, in generating a matrix of possibilities for productive debate, he avoided both relativism and the entrapments of dogmatism.