This state-of-the-art overview reflects the rich variety of approaches and disciplines embraced by contemporary communication studies. The book consists of thirteen original essays by some of the most prominent communication scholars, including Ien Ang, Deidre Boden, David Crowley, James M. Collins, Klaus Krippendorff, William Leiss, Denis McQuail, William Melody, Joshua Meyrowitz, David Mitchell, Mark Poster, Majid Tehranian, John B. Thompson and Teun A. van Dijk.

In a fashion that might have surprised him, Wyclif s principles of interpretation anticipate and interact with the hermeneutical reflections of our own time.

Philosophers in the tradition of Berkeley say that the first step in gaining knowledge from perception is to report or describe one's perceptual data, or that which one sees ‘immediately'. Further, perceptual data are existing things of some sort, and always are exactly as they appear to be since, as H. H. Price says, “in the sphere of the given … what seems, is”. However, these two claims about perceptual data are sometimes incompatible, as the following case shows. Suppose a (...) man looking at a speckled hen reports that it has many speckles but is not able to report the exact number of speckles it has. If above is correct, the man's perceptual datum, as opposed to the physical hen itself which he sees—according to Berkeleians—in a merely indirect sense, would have to be indeterminate in character. Yet we assume that everything which exists ) is and has to be completely determinate. A person's knowledge is indeterminate if he knows that the planet Mars has either two or three satellites and doesn't know which. But Mars itself at any moment has to have some definite number of satellites. (shrink)

Over the fourteen years that we have been publishing Comparative and Continental Philosophy, we have shared five Special Issues with our readers. The first was published in our seventh year and was...

After distinguishing professional ethic s from legal and aesthetic norms I argue that a version of rule-utilitarianism is best able to account for professional ethics. The alleged relativism of role-specific duties is a badly posed issue, I argue, since how morality comes to one critically depends upon one's occupation. Alternative theories of the foundations of professional ethics are criticized, both consent theories and the views of those who object to the legalism implicit in a rule-based theory. A mixed theory of (...) virtue is defended to include the most important aspects of an ethic of virtue in the overall rule-utilitarian framework. (shrink)

In concluding his ‘Autobiographical notes’, Albert Einstein explained that the purpose of his exposition was to ‘show the reader how the efforts of a life hang together and why they have led to expectations of a definite form’. Einstein's remarks tell of a coherence between personal ‘strivings and searchings’ and scientific activity, which has all but vanished in the midst of the current trend of social constructivism in history of science. As Nancy Nersessian recently pointed out, in the process of (...) illuminating complex relationships between scientific activity and its social context, ‘socio-historical analysis has “black-boxed” the individual scientist’. Has the pendulum swung too far? In reaction to the preceding great-man hagiographie approach to the history of science, the social constructivists have largely ‘thrown the baby out with the bathwater’; consideration of individual scientists' personal approaches to science was unnecessarily expunged with the removal of ‘genius’ as an explanatory tool. (shrink)

The word for “life” and the word for “violence” are etymological neighbors in many languages. Compare, for example, vita and vis in Latin, bios and bia in Greek, jivah and jiya in Sanskrit, as well as the Indo-European *guiuos and *guiie (all the former stand for “life,” “aliveness,” or “living,” while the latter stand for “violence,” “force,” or “strength”). But when you try to trace a genealogy of this decisive link within the field of theory, rather than that of linguistics, (...) you soon come to face a founding text that is actually a phantom. In a letter to Gershom Scholem…. (shrink)

Not always, concludes this C.P.A. who asks that laymen be critical.

Nietzsche Unbound presents a new and unusual interpretation of Nietzsche as a genuinely religious thinker who not only grasped the nature of humanity's current spiritual predicament, but also set forth an overlooked and truly revolutionary solution to it.

Outline by Section: INTRODUCTION HUSSERL'S TRANSCENDENTAL POSITION Brentano's Notion of Intentionality Frege's Notion of Sinn Husserl's Transcendental Position Intentional Relations are not Causal. Realism is Wrong, Objects must be Meaningful Psychological States are Empirical. Meanings cannot be In-Themselves, but always for an Ego SEARLE'S THEORY OF INTENTIONALITY CONFRONTATION OF SEARLE'S THEORY WITH THE FOUR THESES Searle Intentionalizes or Trivializes Causation Searle is still a Realist Visual Experience is a Thing-In-Itself Intentional States Presented as Stopping Points CONCLUSION.

The concept of culture is best understood from a genetic and functional point of view. To cultivate an object is to develop the potentialities of its nature with a view to a definite end or result. For example, agriculture is the process whereby the potentialities of the earth and of seeds are cultivated with a view to growing edible plants. Similarly, one may speak of pearl culture or bee culture to indicate the process of cultivation or production of pearls or (...) bees through the agency of man. By transference, the term has historically been applied to man himself and refers to the process of self-cultivation of man by man. Human culture, or anthropo-culture as it may be called, originally comprised the various ways in which man has tended his nature so as to make it grow or develop in a specific way. In classical Western civilization, as man differentiated between his body and his soul, he came to attach greater importance to the cultivation of his soul and culture became identified with the culture of the soul. Genetically, human culture refers to the education, or cultivation, of the whole man considered as an organism and not only to the mental or spiritual aspects of his nature. Plato’s concept of paideia, which comprised the education of the body through gymnastics and that of the soul through the liberal arts, reflects this holistic approach to the human cultural process. In time, culture came to mean the state of being educated as distinct from the process of education and then, still later, came to refer to the whole intelligible world revealed by education, to wisdom as a product of a liberal education. (shrink)

The third of five commentaries on “Bloomberg's Health Legacy: Urban Innovator or Meddling Nanny?” from the September‐October 2013.

Can x need y without our being in a position to conceptualize y? Nothing, given ten seconds thought, is easier to show. Every man, woman, and child from the beginning of the human race needed Vitamin C as one ingredient in the minimum provisions for their food. It was only in this century, however, that people arrived at the concept of Vitamin C and became able to assert the need for it. On the record, we may expect more such discoveries.

The retired Byzantine bureaucrat, Zosimus, wrote his New History in the early sixth century. This work is not only one of the primary sources for the history of the Later Roman Empire in the fourth and early fifth centuries a.d., but it is also the primary witness to the now fragmentary Histories of Eunapius of Sardis which it faithfully epitomizes. In the last part of the New History which depends upon Eunapius, two lacunae have been detected which are of interest (...) with respect to the original texts of both authors. (shrink)

Stakeholder salience has proven an elusive measure of critical stakeholders. Existing stakeholder theory commonly focuses on firm-centric maps. The technique employed in this paper offers a measurable and visual approach to stakeholder salience. This paper operationalizes the stakeholder salience concept using an issue focus, furthering stakeholder theory while providing an example of its application.

There are many theories of the drivers of energy use in buildings and how this evolves over different timescales. Moezzi and Lutzenhiser (2010, p. 4) characterized these perspectives as technology—in which energy use is determined by the characteristics of buildings and technologies; economics—in which the consumer is conceived as an economically rational utility maximizer; psychology—in which individuals' mental processes give rise to consumption choices; and sociology, anthropology, and social studies of technology—in which patterns of consumption are socially-negotiated and larger social (...) systems exert substantial influence. With these differences in theoretical approach come differences in epistemology, ranging .. (shrink)