In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler demonstrates the priority of rhetoric to ethics, noting that any giving of an account already involves the scene of address: a relational dimension of language which supersedes the account itself . You demonstrate in The Telephone Book and elsewhere that you are called into being, that the call precedes you, indicating the priority of rhetoric to a certain pre-Heideggerian ontology. A major concern of this special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric involves the (...) ways in which “the human” is constructed and/or deconstructed through this predicament of addressivity, particularly when the address comes in from or goes out to a nonhuman other: say, an animal, an .. (shrink)

Although California is often regarded as a regional civilization within the United States of America, this article argues that California justifies being considered a major civilization in itself, indeed the only genuinely 21stcentury civilization, if only because of its top ranking among world economies. The article traces the varied facets of California natural and social history to show the overriding importance of biodiversity as a perennially unifying theme for an understanding of that civilization, and it confronts the varied challenges to (...) this biodiversity that constitute more recent California history and politics. (shrink)