Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 49, No. 3, 2016 Copyright © 2016 Te Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Metonymies of Mind: Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and the Rhetoric of Liberal Education Sean Ross Meehan abstract Critics in both philosophy and literary studies have rightly emphasized a “poetics of transition” relating the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson to that of William James. However, less attention has been given to the ways that Emerson’s philosophy of rhetoric correlates with James’s rhetorical perspectives on psychology and philoso- phy. Fundamentally rhetorical interests in the contiguous circumstances and con- tingent reception of thinking link James to Emerson beyond matters of poetics and style. Tis article correlates Emerson’s understanding of a rhetoric of metonymy as the basis of thinking with the principle of contiguity crucial to James’s philosophy of mind. Tis relation between rhetoric and philosophy reiterates a rhetoric of mind that both Emerson and James associate with the older liberal education of the college just at the point that this curriculum is displaced by the professional, spe- cialized disciplines of the emerging university in late nineteenth-century America. Keywords: Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, metonymy, liberal education, rhetorical pedagogy “undisciplinables” Conventional wisdom concerning the intellectual relation between Ralph Waldo Emerson, America’s frst public intellectual, and William James, arguably Emerson’s greatest philosophical progeny, has tended to follow a path of invidious comparison. “Literary critics admit his philosophy and deny his literature,” John Dewey notes in characterizing this tendency in an PR 49.3_03_Meehan.indd 277 25/05/16 1:46 PM