BiblioVault - Books about Communication

Language and Human Understanding

David Braine

Catholic University of America Press, 2014

Philosopher, psychologist and linguist are all concerned with natural language. Accordingly, in seeking a unified view, Braine draws on insights from all these fields, sifting through the discordant schools of linguists. He concludes that one extended logic or integrated semantic syntax shapes grammar, but without constricting languages to being of one grammatical type.

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Levinas's Rhetorical Demand

The Unending Obligation of Communication Ethics

Ronald C. Arnett. Foreword by Algis Mickunas

Southern Illinois University Press, 2017

Distinguished Book Award, Philosophy of Communication Division, National Communication Association, 2017

Top Book Award, Communication Ethics Division, National Communication Association, 2017

Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy explicates a human obligation and responsibility to and for the Other that is an unending and imperfect commitment. In Levinas’s Rhetorical Demand: The Unending Obligation of Communication Ethics, Ronald C. Arnett underscores the profundity of Levinas’s insights for communication ethics.

Arnett outlines communication ethics as a primordial call of responsibility central to Levinas’s writing and mission, analyzing it through a Levinasian lens with examination of social artifacts ranging from the Heidegger-Cassirer debate to Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World story concerning illicit possession of information.

Levinas’s Rhetorical Demand offers an account of Levinas’s project and the pragmatic implications of attending to a call of responsibility to and for the Other. This book yields a rich and nuanced understanding of Levinas’s work, revealing the practical importance of his insights, and including a discussion of related theorists and thinkers.

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The Long Arm of Papal Authority

Late Medieval Christian Peripheries and Their Communications with the Holy See

Gerhard Jaritz

Central European University Press, 2005

The volume contains selected papers from two conferences in 2003, at the University of Bergen (Norway) and at Central European University in Budapest. They deal comparatively with the communication of the Holy See with Northern Europe and Eastern Central Europe in the Late Middle Ages, both areas at the margins of Western Christendom. Special emphasis is placed on analysis of registers in the Apostolic Penitentiary.

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