In The Human Image in Helmuth Plessner, Pierre Bourdieu, and Psychocentric Culture, Isaac E. Catt offers a unique criticism of naturalistic reductions of humans to animals, to neuro substrates and to DNA. Catt explores a new interpretation of Plessner and Bourdieu, revealing the combinatory logic of semiotic phenomenology in both and their common problematic of communication. Through an emergent synthesis of philosophical anthropology and communicology, this book provides a basis for criticism of the failed mechanistic medical model in psychiatry, a fresh argument for reconceptualizing psychiatry as a human science, and for construction of a new ecological image of communicative being. Throughout the book, alternative attempts to transcend dualisms such as cybernetics, anti-anthropocentrism, and biosemiotics are revealed to risk reification of the very objects of their analysis. Scholars of communication, semiotics, and psychology will find this book of particular interest.

Winner of the National Communication Association 2018 Philosophy of Communication Division Top Edited Book Award This edited volume develops the philosophy of communication inspired by the scholarship of Richard L. Lanigan, with emphasis on communicology as a human science. Lanigan's syntheses of the philosophies of speech, language and discourse stemming from the works of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Charles Sanders Peirce, Roman Jakobson, Umberto Eco, Pierre Bourdieu, Jurgen Reusch and Gregory Bateson, and many others offers a compelling framework for systematic analysis of human communication in all domains of lived experience. His work defines the theory and method of the human sciences in general and the discipline of communicology in particular. The focus in this collection is on the theoretical and methodological foundations for semiotic phenomenology whereby communication is recognized as constitutive of all human conscious experience and social relationships, involving gestural, nonverbal, discursive, performative, artistic, poetic and mass mediated forms. The volume is divided into five thematic sections: Founding(s), which marks out primary influences on communicology conceived as a human science; Tropologic(s), which reveals how abduction, adduction and semiosis are essential for understanding human conduct in multiple forms of expression; Trans/formations, which addresses problems of change in self-other relations advancing an ethical life; Voicing Bodies/Embodied Voices, which elaborates the reversible relations between body and voice, and voice and world; and Horizons of Communicability, which takes up operative intentionalities that typically escape human conscious experience. All chapters are original to this volume, written by leading international scholars in the philosophy of communication who cross several disciplinary boundaries in the human sciences.

Winner of the National Communication Association 2018 Philosophy of Communication Division Top Edited Book Award This edited volume develops the philosophy of communication inspired by the scholarship of Richard L. Lanigan, with emphasis on communicology as a human science. Lanigan's syntheses of the philosophies of speech, language and discourse stemming from the works of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Charles Sanders Peirce, Roman Jakobson, Umberto Eco, Pierre Bourdieu, Jurgen Reusch and Gregory Bateson, and many others offers a compelling framework for systematic analysis of human communication in all domains of lived experience. His work defines the theory and method of the human sciences in general and the discipline of communicology in particular. The focus in this collection is on the theoretical and methodological foundations for semiotic phenomenology whereby communication is recognized as constitutive of all human conscious experience and social relationships, involving gestural, nonverbal, discursive, performative, artistic, poetic and mass mediated forms. The volume is divided into five thematic sections: Founding(s), which marks out primary influences on communicology conceived as a human science; Tropologic(s), which reveals how abduction, adduction and semiosis are essential for understanding human conduct in multiple forms of expression; Trans/formations, which addresses problems of change in self-other relations advancing an ethical life; Voicing Bodies/Embodied Voices, which elaborates the reversible relations between body and voice, and voice and world; and Horizons of Communicability, which takes up operative intentionalities that typically escape human conscious experience. All chapters are original to this volume, written by leading international scholars in the philosophy of communication who cross several disciplinary boundaries in the human sciences.

Communicology is widely accepted on the international scene as a new name for the study of human communication. It replaces several equivocal disciplinary conceptions such as "communication," which may fail to distinguish the science of communication from its object of investigation or the message-centered "communication studies," which often obfuscates information exchange with the experience of shared meaning in human encounters. Communicology differs from the American mainstream social science of communication not only because it is grounded in communication theory rather than information theory, but also because it advances a philosophically informed ecological perspective on human discourse. This book is intended as a contribution to the philosophy of communication and the human science of communicology. Semiotic phenomenology is thoroughly described as the synthetic logic that combines a philosophy of consciousness with a science of culture and conduct to explicate the lifeworld habitus. Consciousness is viewed as cultural-semiotic and experience as personal-phenomenological. This is a reciprocal, reflexive relationship in which culture is conceived as consciousness of communication and communication the manifest experience of culture. The book describes embodiment so conceived, including the history of the matrix idea in American pragmatism and European philosophy as they commingled in the United States to produce a unique discipline of communication, the science of embodied discourse. Important roots of this new discipline are described for the first time here in a unique synthesis of C. S. Peirce, John Dewey, Gregory Bateson, and Pierre Bourdieu. In addition, the semiotic relativity hypothesis is argued to be an important implication of this new discipline. Transcending the stale debate on language and thought, the limited conception of linguistic relativity is considerably broadened and deepened. The distinctive lifeworld of humans is argued to occur at the threshold of sign consciousness in the semiotic matrix of culture-society-person. Semiotic phenomenology is not only a synthesis of two great European philosophical movements, structuralism and phenomenology; it is also the essence of American pragmatism. This view culminates in the contemporary human science of communicology.

This book offers a new way of thinking about communication that moves beyond normative perspectives. Exhibiting postmodern theory, communicology is an idea whose time has come. Working within the European human science tradition and the philosophy of American pragmatism, the authors included in this first anthology of its kind applies a synthesis of semiotics and phenemology to the study of the cultural and social conditions of communicative praxis. Framed by the themes of human agency and efficacy, these essays focus on the realms of conscious experience in intrapersonal communicology (the self-domain), interpersonal communicology (self-other domain), social communicology (group-organization domain), and cultural communicology (group-to-group domain, including mass media and trans-cultural communication). It is the usual case in the social sciences that communication is ignored or treated as a means to more substantative ends. More-over, much work within discourse study proceeds on implicit, deeply held, culturally embedded ontological and epistemological assumptions about communication that are positivistic. Hence, uncritical and non-reflexive approaches to communication and discourse prevail. This book provides an alternative to readers curious about the fundamental nature of human communication rather than viewing this phenomenon as a mere vehicle for referents or thoughts. A designation first introduced in the United States in the 1950s by founders of the International Communication Association, the term communicology is now used to define parameters of a unique research endeavor. At its heart is the refusal of the dominant logos of discourse as the only legitimate expression of the humane. Broadly defined as the study of human discourse, this critical-interpretive approach interrogates the reversible, reciprocal, and reflexive nature of the "expressive and perceptive body," understood as the point of mediation between us and the cultural signs and codes of discourse in which we live. Communicology i

Philosophy of Communication Ethics is a unique and timely contribution to the study of communication ethics. This series of essays articulates unequivocally the intimate connection between philosophy of communication and communication ethics. This scholarly volume assumes that there is a multiplicity of communication ethics. What distinguishes one communication ethic from another is the philosophy of communication in which a particular ethic is grounded. Philosophy of communication is the core ingredient for understanding the importance of and the difference between and among communication ethics. The position assumed by this collection is consistent with Alasdair MacIntyre s insights on ethics. In A Short History of Ethics, he begins with one principal assertion philosophy is subversive. If one cannot think philosophically, one cannot question taken-for-granted assumptions. In the case of communication ethics, to fail to think philosophically is to miss the bias, prejudice, and assumptions that constitute a given communication ethic."

Philosophy of Communication Ethics is a unique and timely contribution to the study of communication ethics. This series of essays articulates unequivocally the intimate connection between philosophy of communication and communication ethics. This scholarly volume assumes that there is a multiplicity of communication ethics. What distinguishes one communication ethic from another is the philosophy of communication in which a particular ethic is grounded. Philosophy of communication is the core ingredient for understanding the importance of and the difference between and among communication ethics. The position assumed by this collection is consistent with Alasdair MacIntyre's insights on ethics. In A Short History of Ethics, he begins with one principal assertion-philosophy is subversive. If one cannot think philosophically, one cannot question taken-for-granted assumptions. In the case of communication ethics, to fail to think philosophically is to miss the bias, prejudice, and assumptions that constitute a given communication ethic.