My Philosophy of Rhetoric

What does it mean to study communication and gender through a rhetorical/philosophy of communication lens? I think the first thing I have to do to answer this question is to define what I think the rhetoric/philosophy of communication phrase means.

Earlier I offered the following definition: "By using language both effectively and persuasively communication scholars praxically explore the relations and intersections between contemporary arguments, positions, philosophical concerns, and the study of communication itself in an effort to provide a place for those interests which challenge the current assumptions of the discipline (theory building)."

Wow. That is a confusing piece of phrasing that I did in the above definition. Basically, I think that to study from a rhetorical/philosophical standpoint is to study the article, event, object, person, etc... in an all encompassing way. To study an article from this perspective, you must look at the time the piece was written in because no one can be a-historical. The author is, for good or ill, a product of their times and culture.

Because of the impossibility of being a-historical, we can factor the author's time period and its events into determining several things. These include the author's frame of reference (personal history), their understanding of social constructions and the material world, discourse of the age, and how all of the preceding information affected their ontology and epistemology.

All of these things are determined during the analysis of what the article is actually saying about the topic and how the author says it. And to top it all off, we can take all of the information that we've gathered, throw it in a martini shaker (if we adhere to Burke), and pour out a brand new piece of theory! This is a process that will never end.