As a doctoral student it is wise to begin focusing on your area of specialty as early as possible in your doctoral program. This allows, like a good wine, time for maturation, depth, and complexity in your discourse process. It is also wise to choose those areas of interest that enable one to enter into the ongoing and currently developing dialogue of the field of communication. Essential to this process, and the humanities in general, is the field of philosophy.

Academic philosophy involves the history and process of that thinking which thoughtful men and women have constructed over the last several thousand years in response to the deeper questions of meaning, being, value and knowing. Looked upon this way philosophy becomes the exciting process of Humankind's attempt to unravel those mysteries which have concerned thinking people from the origin of the reflective life, i.e., what is, how do we know what exists, and what is the value and meaning such existence. In essence, these are the key questions that underlie metaphysics (and ontology), epistemology and axiology.

In writing about Jacques Lacan, one of the major influential thinkers of the latter part of our century, Samuel Roberts, in his book Between Philosophy and Psychiatry, divides the history of Western philosophy into a three stages. That is, Ancient and Medieval philosophy focused more on ontology, cosmology, and metaphysics, the 16th through 18th century philosophers on epistemology, and the 19th and 20th century thinkers centering on language. Admittedly a great exaggeration, (he leaves out entirely the axiological questions of ethics and aesthetics which have concerned every era), his simplistic division does, nonetheless, provide as interesting way to gaze upon that complexity known as Western philosophy especially in terms of the conflation of epistemology and ontology in the contemporary obsession with language which marks the contemporary era.

From such a perspective we can discern some main currents operating in contemporary (late 19th and 20th century) Western philosophy: Existentialism, Phenomenology, Analyticalism, the philosophy of Language and "Postmodernism".

At the heart of each of these "schools", "systems", "discourses", and "texts" is Language. In other words, with the breakdown of the Greek rational paradigm and the dissolution of the Judeo-Christian weltanschauung, human beings are now viewed as word-inscribed beings attempting to understand the "real" in terms of the inescapable medium into which they are born. It could be said that the language is the new frontier at our end philosophic history. In some ways, too, this could be conceived as a return to the roots of Western philosophy embodied in the of the debates of the Pre-Socratics, the Sophists and Plato.

However one views the major philosophic discourses of the 20th century philosophy, the essence of our field of communication involves "language," the use of signs, symbols, and signifiers. Because of this universal necessity of "language" communication study, scholars cannot escape from the philosophic debates which mark our own era. As a result, our discipline finds itself in both a major transition and an ensuing vacuum. A transition toward the full consequences of the signifed construction of "reality" and the de-hierarchicization of "textuality", i.e., the reduction of privilege and power in terms of meaning and value. Thus, the radical questioning of signification which marks the "postmodern" symptom has left many asking where do we go from here now that Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida have had their say?

Such is the challenge facing you as you take up philosophy and seek to respond to the challenge of and within our discipline. With this in light, the following is a list of Contemporary philosophers and some of their major works to be considered for Assignment One. Again, though not exhaustive, each of these influential "thinkers" will help you deepen your understanding of the thought currents that underlie and presently influence our discipline. Listing of a work or works is meant only to help direct you to the philosopher which is the focus of this first assignment.

Austin, John. The Providence of Jurisprudence.

Ayer, A.J. The Problem of Knowledge, The Empirical Foundations of Knowledge.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasures of the Text, Mythologies, Image-Music-Text.

Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign.

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.

Camus, Albert. The Plague.

Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. Sexuality and the Mind: The Role of the Father and the Mother in the Psyche.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender.

Cixous, Helene. Demystifications.

Danto, Arthur. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.

Deleuse (Deleuze), Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy.

Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

Dewey, John. Ethics, Human Nature and Conduct, Knowing and the Known.

Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics.

Foucault, Michel. The Order Of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Madness and Civilization, Power/Knowledge.

Fletcher, Joseph. Situation Ethics: The New Morality.

Freud, Sigmond. The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Civilizations and its Discontents.

Gramsci, Antonio. Notes from Prison.

Heidegger, Martin. What is Metaphysics?, Being and Time.

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas, Cartesian Meditations.

Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Word and Language.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrites, Seminar XI.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology, The Savage Mind.

Kojeve, Alexander. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.

Kristiva, Julia. Desire in Language.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory.

Merleau-Ponty, M. The Phenomenology of Perception.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, The Twilight of the Idols, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Thus Spake Zarathustra, A Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo, The Will To Power.

Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica, Philosophic Papers, Some Main Problems in Philosophy.

Peirce, C.S. Collected Papers.

Quine, Willard. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays.

Russell, Bertrand. Principia Mathematica, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz.

Ryles, Gilbert. Dilemmas.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness, Existentialism and Humanism.

Whitehead, A.N. Adventures of Ideas.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Volosinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.