Communicology is the study of human discourse in all of its forms, ranging from human gesture and speech to art and television. Commuicology also represents the dominant qualitative research paradigm in the discipline of human communication, especially in the applied areas of mass communication, philosophy of communication, and speech communication. Lanigan's work offers the bold and original thesis that Michel Foucault's thematic study of the discourse of desire and power is an elaboration of the problematic discourse explicated in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's interrogation of freedom and terror.Various chapters cover such topics as art versus science, culture and communication, modernity versus postmodernity, feminism versus humanism, research methodology, and the capta versus data distinction for research validity. Actual examples of research cover the aesthetics of painting and sculpture, radio and television, rhetorical criticism of oral and written texts, and the East-West perspective on cross-cultural encounter &#8212; all using the approach of semiotic phenomenology. Two special features of this book make it useful for both teacher and scholar alike. First, Lanigan provides an encyclopedic dictionary that illustrates and defines the theory and method of the human sciences in general and the discipline of communicology in particular. Used for several years by teachers in a number of universities, this dictionary had already become a &#8220;classic&#8221; among students before its publication here. Second, Lanigan analyzes and illustrates what has been missing for years in the study of Foucault's work: a definition (with appropriate illustrative figures and tables) of Foucault's method of archaeology and genealogy (criticism) for research in the human sciences, especially in the study of human discourse.

The Human Science of Communicology: A Phenomenology of Discourse in Foucault and Merleau-Ponty

Politics & Social Sciences

Lanigan, Richard L.

Philosophy

Univ Pr of New England

Originally published in 1973, this work continues to be a classic in the field of French phenomenology, focusing on his most seminal representative, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By tracing how Merleau-Ponty accounts for the beginning of philosophical thought in the dual sense of understanding its origin and showing how that origin permits philosophy (and all thought) to achieve truth, Sallis demonstrates that this process is never fully completed. With a signifigant revival of interest in French phenomenology in recent years, this paperback edition--with a new preface by Sallis--provides an enduring and important voice to the dialogue.

Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings

Sallis, John

Imagining Bodies: Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Imagination

Imagining Bodies demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the body has broad implications for philosophy, aesthetics and the social sciences. By examining Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the body as a dialectic of habituation and creativity, Steeves unveils a deeper relation between self and world that is mediated by images of embodiment. Imagining Bodies is a testament to the importance of the body and the imagination in our perception of reality at a time when the philosophy of the body is associated with metaphysical presence.

Steeves, James B.

Reading texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, David Michael Levin continues his questioning of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of our culturally dominant mode of perception, using vision and the philosophical discourse vision has generated as the site of thinking critically about the moral and political culture in which we are living. In a series of independent essays that focus on specific texts of each thinker, Levin examines their respective challenges to "ocularcentrism" and the political vision they imply. In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, in one way or another, the distinctive pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision?if only through the faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing?the prospects for a radically different lifeworld.

The Philosopher's Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment

Levin, David Michael

Encountering the Other: The Artwork and the Problem of Difference in Blanchot and Levinas

Two of the most creative and compelling thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century, Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas first encountered each other in the 1920s and began a friendship that was to span over seven decades. Their subsequent exchanges of ideas and shared concerns, as well as their significant differences and influence on one another, have profound implications for the work of each. Encountering the Other represents the most sustained analysis to date of the intersections of structure and content in Blanchot and Levinas's most representative and complex works.

Toumayan, Alain P.

he Ways of Power advances a hermeneutical conception of ethics, one oriented particularly toward questions of power and the critique of power in the aftermath of foundationalism. Bringing into mutual interrogation such disparate traditions as hermeneutics, liberalism, critical theory and postmodernism, and such figures as Gadamer, Ricoeur, Habermas, Foucault, Nietzsche, and Artistotle, Fairfield argues that the principal question of ethics is no longer how to ground practices and judgments on a secure epistemological foundation. Rather, what is of importance is how normative discourses rooted in tradition and invested with power may adopt a critical posture toward these same conditions without generating an impossible circularity. Fairfield asserts that the practice of social criticism is ultimately inseparable from that of hermeneutic interpretation; critique is a matter of perceiving and understanding contexts of moral action in light of principles. In taking this view, Fairfield defends hermeneutics?in particular, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics?against the charge leveled at it by critical theorists?in particular, Jürgen Habermas?that hermeneutical philosophy's emphasis on historicity and finitude demonstrates an absence of critical perspective in reflecting upon tradition and the power operative within tradition. With this objection in mind, Fairfield embarks upon his project to formulate a hermeneutical ethics. Ethical criticism, he maintains, belongs to the universal practice that is the struggle for illumination and self-understanding, a practice ubiquitous in human existence and central to the task of fashioning a just order. The Ways of Power is unique in bringing together a myriad of philosophical voices and perspectives, not to continue a quest for moral certainty and objective grounds?which is so often sought in contemporary society, but which Fairfield insists must be given up?but to take seriously the need for rationality in moral and political discourse.

Ways Of Power: Hermeneutics, Ethics And Social Criticism

Fairfield, Paul

Unlike many recent studies that have purported to examine the scope of Levinas's thinking, Toward the Outside is distinguished by its attention to texts from both of Levinas's two main genres: the philosophical and the confessional. Organized into three parts, the first examines key pairs of concepts totality/infinity, same/other, saying/said, among others. Smith demonstrates a keen attunement to the development of Levinas's thought as an overall philosophical trajectory. In part 2, Smith more explicitly identifies themes that are essential to our better understanding of Levinas Judaism and the Holocaust, temporality, Levinas's treatment of Husserl and Heidegger, Derrida's reading of Levinas, and others. Finally, in part 3, his commentary, based on close readings of selected Levinas texts, meticulously follows and highlights the development of Levinas's thought.

Toward The Outside: Concepts And Themes In Emmanuel Levinas

SMITH, MICHAEL B.

An Ontological Study of Death: From Hegel to Heidegger

In An Ontological Study of Death: From Hegel to Heidegger, Sean Ireton examines conceptions of death as manifested in German Literary Studies and philosophy from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, expanding on thanatological theories that distinguish between a metaphysical and an ontological view of human finitude. Whereas metaphysics separates life from death and posits a transcendent reality beyond the physical world, the ontological perspective integrates death into the very core of being where it functions as a fundamental phenomenon of life. Arguing that the dialectical thinking of Hegel and Hölderlin erases the metaphysical paradigm of death and sets the stage for the existential interpretations advanced by Nietzsche, Rilke, and Heidegger, Ireton maintains that each of these authors ultimately seeks to incorporate the traditional realm of nonbeing into the heart of existence. Framed by the opposing philosophies of Hegel, who deems that death has little personal meaning but is vital for the life of Spirit, and Heidegger, who converts death into the determining factor of selfhood, Ireton's study finds common ground in the way death is viewed?as the promise of possibility, freedom and wholeness. Though primarily focused on the Germanic tradition, Ireton's study also addresses the modern French philosophical treatment of death by Blanchot, Kojève, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault in the wake of their German predecessors. Ireton concludes by placing the dialectical and existential views discussed in his study within the context of modern thanatology, specifically demonstrating how themes of human finitude and freedom have a direct bearing on the current debate surrounding the dignity of death and the right to die.

Ireton, Sean

Heidegger's Jewish Followers: Essays on Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas

Given Heidegger's eventual alliance with Nazism -- which many scholars feel had its roots in his thought from its inception -- it is remarkable that many of his students and followers were Jews. Much has been written on the importance of Heidegger's philosophy and of how his decision to support the Nazis can affect how his thought is to be understood, but the question of how he influenced his Jewish students and the development of their own philosophical voices has been little examined. Heidegger's Jewish Followers, then, addresses very important and relatively unexplored questions, namely, in what way did Heidegger's thought affect his most prominent Jewish students, and how did they respond to this influence?

A book of essays on the writings ofThomas Jefferson, which hold endless fascination for Americans and...for thoughtful people worldwide.

Thomas Jefferson and the Education of a Citizen

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

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