This paper discusses the possibility of an ethics of difference. It begins with an introduction to current poststructural and critical theories in order to show their significance for transcultural politics and ethics. Its theme is formulated in terms of the debate between the affirmation of ethical cognitivism cast in the form of universalism and the advocacy of moral skepticism in the mode of communitarianism. Distancing itself from the idea of universal morality, this paper attempts to respond to the challenge of (...) both communitarians and deconstructionists in contemporary French poststructuralism. In the end, it argues for transversality in place of universality. (shrink)

Using a U.S. and a Canadian example, in this article we argue that news reports of murder, especially of the heavily covered signal crimes that become part of community storytelling, often employ predetermined formulas that probe intrusively into the lives of those involved in the murder but ultimately come away with only cheaply sketched, stick-figure portraits. The thesis is that crime coverage that is formulaic tends to produce cynicism and a distance between the reader and those involved in the crime. (...) However, a deeper and more caring probe into the causes and consequences of crime could lead the community to wider conversations about responsibility, social justice, and reconciliation. What is required to expand the reporting of murder stories is more of the ethic of care that can serve to both deepen the public's understanding of the individual crime and widen the community's dialogue about its significance. (shrink)

Argumentation is a form of communication, rather than an application of(formal) logic, and is used in communicative activity as a means forinquiry, although it is more typically thought of as bringing inquiry toclosure. Thus interpretation is an intrinsic and crucial aspect ofconversational (interactive) argumentation. In order to further thisunderstanding of argumentative activity, I propose a procedure forinterpretation that draws upon hermeneutic phenomenology. In response tocriticisms by argumentation theorists (and others) who understand thistradition as oriented to psychological, perceptual, or textual objects, (...) Iargue that hermeneutic phenomenology supports methods for analysis ofpublic communicative activity. The resulting conception of ’thick argumentation‘ responds to contemporary (postmodern) claims that argumentation valorizes univocity, stasis, and certainty at the expense ofthe pluralism, fluctuation, and range of epistemic results thatcharacterize discourse in the public sphere. (shrink)

If you do not wish to construe philosophical discourse as simply a discourse of cognition, a theoretical discourse; if you think it is also a practical, ethical discourse: how should you write? How should you frame the ethos, the authority of your discourse? This article re‐presents an extended preface I wrote and rewrote obsessively over a period of nearly two years in an effort to forge a voice and mode of address adequate to my sense of philosophical discourse as a (...) practical discourse, whilst also being accountable to the generic requirements of a PhD. As the textual record of this struggle, the value of this text must remain primarily in its capacity to evoke or provoke similar generic memories or ambitions in the reader. (shrink)

Philosophers and artists consider the relevance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for understanding art and aesthetic experience. This collection of essays brings together diverse but interrelated perspectives on art and perception based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty focused almost exclusively on painting in his writings on aesthetics, this collection also considers poetry, literary works, theater, and relationships between art and science. In addition to philosophers, the contributors include a painter, a photographer, a musicologist, and an architect. This widened (...) scope offers important philosophical benefits, testing and providing evidence for the empirical applicability of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic writings. The central argument is that for Merleau-Ponty the account of perception is also an account of art and vice versa. In the philosopher’s writings, art and perception thus intertwine necessarily rather than contingently such that they can only be distinguished by abstraction. As a result, his account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. The contributors examine various aspects of this intertwining across different artistic media, each ingeniously revealing an original perspective on this intertwining. (shrink)

Thomas Flynn's work on Sartre and Foucault, the first of a two-volume project, offers a unique opportunity for examining an existential theory of history. It occasions rethinking existential-social categories from the vantage point of the poststructuralist turn. And it contributes to developing existential variants of critical theory. The following questions guide me in each of the three above areas. First, how is human history intelligible, given not only our finite sense of ourselves but also claims that we have reached the (...) end of history? Second, with the poststructuralist eclipse of dialectics, can we render existential categories in social terms and vice versa? Third, critics decry grand theorizing even in fallibilist reason, e.g., of Habermas, while others are worried by the normative deficits of poststructuralist nominalism, e.g., of Foucault. Can existential variants of critical social theory, anticipated before Sartre by Marcuse, split the difference? (shrink)

This essay describes conversation as an ensemble accomplishment that can be illuminated by critics working with specific texts within a rhetorical framework. We first establish dialogue as the key concept for any criticism of conversation, specifying the rhetorical dimensions of interpersonal dialogue. Second, we show how template thinking is particularly dangerous for conversational critics and suggest a research (anti)method, based on a coauthorship, that provides a thoroughgoing dialogical access to texts. Finally, we exemplify dialogic criticism of a conversational text by (...) analyzing the famous 1957 dialogue of philosopher Martin Buber and psychologist Carl Rogers. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to contribute to a more robust theory of leadership that shifts the frame of reference from leadership as exclusively facilitated through a single inspired leader to one that includes the view of leadership as an emergent and complex social phenomenon. The article begins with a review of the leader-centric approaches that dominated much of twentieth century leadership studies then moves on to present contemporary critiques of leader-centric approaches leading to an alternative perspective of leadership (...) as an emergent and complex social phenomenon. Viewing leadership as an emergent and complex social phenomenon changes our attitude regarding the roles that leaders and others play in the creation of leadership. A central theme of this article is the impact that the concept of emergence has on leadership theory. In response to this changing attitude, the article then moves to return to and reassess the ontological, epistemological and ethical grounds of leadership and concludes that there is an underlying philosophy that supports viewing leadership as an emergent social phenomenon and further suggests that recent work in virtue epistemology along with Calvin Schrag’s theory of communicative praxis and transversal rationality, can facilitate a better understanding of leadership as an emergent social phenomenon. (shrink)

This paper sets out to demonstrate that a phenomenological reflection on language highlights the possibilities of authenticity in communication, and as such provides a very necessary complement to the dominant linguistic perspectives: the syntactic and grammatical perspective, Saussurean linguistics, and systemic functional linguistics. While the syntactic and grammatical perspective, which predominates in the educational context, presents language as an institutionalized, authoritarian and self-contained system, Saussurean linguistics provides a view of language as a complex, self-contained, technical system, as such reflecting the (...) nature of modern society. The third perspective, systemic functional linguistics, describes templates of specific genre, models which aid students to construct their own, while simultaneously discouraging individual selfexpression. In contrast, a reflective phenomenological perspective identifies and encourages authentic self-expression. The paper concludes by considering ways to reconcile the impetus in language teaching towards, on the one hand, the language of institutional authority, and, on the other, individual self-expression. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 2 August 2006. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Farrell’s MoodsMaurice CharlandIt is difficult to write of the dead and their work, especially when one counts them as friends but does not wish to engage in simple epideictic. Scholarship might well be an unending conversation, but death limits speaking privileges. This undermines the conversational ideal. It certainly has robbed Thomas Farrell of his right to reply to anything that I will now say. For he and his legacy (...) to be treated well, the burden of speaking justly falls to others, who cannot count upon him to offer gentle correctives or collegial objections.In reflecting upon Thomas Farrell’s work, I am struck by the fact that he was simultaneously one of the field’s most respected and yet underappreciated theorists. The esteem in which he was held requires little by way of demonstration. Those who knew him will attest to his erudition and ease with theory. He is oft cited and was regularly called upon to discuss movements or developments in philosophy and rhetoric. Indeed, the very fact that this issue is dedicated to his thought testifies to the regard in which he was held. And so, why do I consider him underappreciated? Quite simply, because few of his colleagues have sought to take up fully his work on its own terms.There are several reasons for this, which I will elaborate briefly below, but they ultimately follow from the fact that Farrell was engaged in a [End Page 337] philosophical project in a field not well disposed to philosophical treatise. I am certain that this sounds odd. More than most fields in communication studies, rhetorical studies has a philosophical patina, and rhetorical scholarship is philosophically informed. Furthermore, philosophy and rhetoric meet regularly on the pages of this journal. Nevertheless, I contend that in the “field,” by which I mean the community of scholars of which Farrell was a part, mostly identified with “speech communication” or the National Communication Association, the development of full-blown philosophies of rhetoric is a marginal pastime. This should not be surprising: philosophers are concerned with very general questions, whereas rhetoricians focus on particulars. Philosophers seek to develop comprehensive representations of grand systems, whereas rhetoricians are pragmatists who focus on practical debates, and given that contingent practical questions are always more pressing that speculative ones, philosophies of rhetoric are for the most part of little immediate interest in rhetoric unless they offer a lever for doing criticism.And so, philosophy typically only has two modes of appearance in rhetorical studies: (1) as a bad object in the neurotic repetition of rhetoric’s foundational gesture, when Plato’s condemnation is reanimated to again be refuted; and (2) as an authoritative excerpt or fragment appropriated to bolster arguments regarding rhetoric’s ontic and epistemic status. Rarely is rhetoric’s nature systematically scrutinized in order to rewrite rhetorical practice. Rhetorical theorists, even when informed by philosophy or by “Theory” (aka French and German thought in ethics, hermeneutics, poststructralism, and philosophy) usually do little more than develop and elaborate a small number of concepts that can then be deployed in the analysis of texts. While each of these is subtended by philosophical commitments, be it to the role of reason or to the relationship of texts to the real, these are usually only alluded to or treated summarily in short “forum” articles that counterpoise grand categories, such as empiricism, postmodernism, and so forth. Hence, rhetorical theory in large measure appears taxonomic to the novice. Directed toward oratorical or critical practice, rhetorical theory presents itself initially as a catalog of situational and textual concepts, such as audience, exigence, enthymeme, style, trope, ideograph, and so on. Though rhetorical theorists and critics are quite adept in deploying these concepts, to either identify the salient elements of a speech or make a claim regarding some aspect of rhetoric’s effectivity, greater questions are usually bracketed or deferred.Baldly put, rhetoric is case bound: theory construction depends on the analysis of rhetorical episodes. Rhetorical analysis is typically directed toward understanding or theorizing a case rather than constructing a theoretical [End Page 338] edifice. This norm in rhetorical studies colors habits of reading and works against a full appreciation of Farrell... (shrink)