Winners Announced in Paluse Faculty Research Grant Competition

The Center for the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (CCIT) has named two recipients for its 2014 Paluse Faculty Research Grant competition.

Dr. Garnet Butchart, assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies, and Dr. Jessica Wiskus, associate professor and chair of musicianship, will each receive a $4,500 Paluse grant, which are awarded to support research and scholarship that reflect the University’s mission and engage resources in the Catholic intellectual tradition.

Butchart is using the grant to support research he’s doing this summer for his book, tentatively titled Community and Communication: Continental Philosophical Perspectives. “The project outlines the historical and conceptual contours of the ideas of ‘community’ and ‘communication’ addressed in the major works of philosophers Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito and Peter Sloterdijk,” said Butchart. “Crucially, it brings the perspectives of each philosopher into dialogue with one another and with inquiry in the field of communication and rhetoric.”

Wiskus is utilizing the grant funding to conduct research for her book in progress, The Breath of Being: On Rhythm and Ethics through the Highest Kind of Music. “A system of ethics, as studied in the Anglo-American philosophical context, is ordinarily evaluated with respect to the truth content of propositional statements; an ethics must operate according to a particular, rational logos—logos understood as the logic of the linguistic sphere,” explains Wiskus. “What I intend to show in my book, The Breath of Being, is that there can be disclosed another ethics, parallel to this tradition, that has been working in the history of philosophy all along.”

This year, the CCIT received a record number of applications from faculty representing six of the 10 schools on campus.