This work presents the first systemic account of the author's innovative theory of semiotic phenomenology and its place in the philosophy of communication and language. The creative and compelling project presented here spans more than fifteen years of systematic eidetic and empirical research into questions of human communication. Using the thematics of Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology, the author explores the concepts and practices of the human sciences that are grounded in communication theory, information theory, language, logic, linguistics, and semiotics. The hermeneutic discussion ranges over contemporary theories that include Roman Jakobson's phenomenological structuralism, the semiotics of Umberto Eco, Charles Pierce, and Alfred Schutz, the theory of speech acts offered by Jurgen Habermas and John Searle, and Michel Foucault's phenomenological rhetoric of discourse. In general, this highly developed study offers the reader a fresh account of the problematic issues in the philosophy of communication. It is a work that any scholar in communication, philosophy, linguistics, or social theory would welcome for its scope and sustained research.

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 -- 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 "classic" 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.

Current rhetorical and critical theory for the most part separates writing from consciousness and presumes relative truth to be the only possible expressive goal for rhetoric. These presumptions are reflected in our tradition of persuasive rhetoric, which values writing that successfully argues one person's belief at the expense of another's. Barbara Couture presents a case for a phenomenological rhetoric, one that values and respects consciousness and selfhood and that restores to rhetoric the possibility of seeking an all-embracing truth through pacific and cooperative interaction. Couture discusses the premises on which current interpretive theory has supported relative truth as the philosophical grounding for rhetoric, premises, she argues, that have led to constraints on our notion of truth that divorce it from human experience. She then shows how phenomenological philosophy might guide the theory and practice of rhetoric, reanimating its role in the human enterprise of seeking a shared truth. She proposes profession and altruism as two guiding metaphors for the phenomenological activity of "truth-seeking through interaction." Among the contemporary rhetoricians and philosophers who influence Couture are Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, Charles Altieri, Charles Taylor, Alasdair Maclntyre, and Jürgen Habermas.

The first concrete presentation of phenomenological method in the philosophy of communication and the first systematic look at Henry Grattan, 18thó19th century Irish statesman. Individual chapters cover the method of semiotic phenomenology as it applies to the specific practice of rhetorical criticism and to the general use of phenomenology as a research procedure. Co-published with the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology.

Concerned with criticizing representational theories of knowledge by developing alternative concepts of knowing and communicating, Ian Angus and Lenore Langsdorf bring together eight essays that are united by a common theme: the convergence of philosophy and rhetoric. In the first chapter, Angus and Langsdorf illustrate the centrality of critical reasoning to the nature of questioning itself, arguing that human inquiry has entered a "new situation" where "the convictions and orientations that have traditionally marked the separation of rhetoric and philosophy--the concern for truth and the focus on persuasion--have begun to converge on a new space that can be defined through the central term discourse."In these essays, this convergence of rhetoric and philosophy is addressed as it presents itself to a variety of interests that transcend the traditional boundaries of these fields. The two editors, Raymie E. McKerrow, Michael J. Hyde and Craig R. Smith, James W. Hikins and Kenneth S. Zagacki, Calvin O. Schrag and David James Miller, and Richard L. Lanigan map this new space, recognizing that such mapping "simultaneously constitutes the territory mapped."

This study considers the relationship between the phenomenon of conscience and the practice of rhetoric as it relates to one of the most controversial issues of our time - euthanasia. The author offers an extensive treatment of Heidegger's and Levinas' philosophical investigations of conscience.