This past spring semester, Dr. Calvin O. Schrag joined students and faculty at Arizona State University at the West Campus and Barrett, the Honors College, to lecture on his recent work. In his talk, “Toward a Philosophy of Communication,” Schrag recounted his conversations with other well known philosophers, including Jaspers, Gadamer, and Marcuse, on the existential experience and communicative praxis.

After the lecture, a group of Communication Studies faculty, graduate students, and Barrett students majoring in Communication Studies joined Dr. Schrag for an intimate dinner to continue the dialogue about his scholarship. Schrag shared insights from his life’s work and absorbed students in lively conversation. Students familiar with Schrag’s work deepened their understanding of his thinking, benefiting from a unique opportunity to discuss works with the author himself. The engagement provided a once in a lifetime opportunity for students and faculty to converse with a great philosophical scholar of our time.

Dr. Ramsey Eric Ramsey, who hosted the event for the Honor’s College, said, “I’m pleased students could converse with a thinker whose work has greatly influenced our understanding of the inextricable link between the study of communication and philosophy. Indeed, his work has created the intellectual space in which many of us theorize today.”

Dr. Calvin O. Schrag is the George Ade Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University and a graduate of Yale and Harvard. Schrag also attended Heidelberg and Oxford as a Fulbright Scholar, and was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. Dr. Schrag’s books include Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, The Self After Postmodernity and most recently, God as Otherwise than Being.