Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human

Acknowledgments

ix acknowledgments Iam indebted to the faculty, staff, and students of the Department of Communication and the Program for Bioethics, Health, and Society, School of Medicine, Wake Forest University, for providing me with communities that make teaching and research an immense joy. For their wisdom, inspiration, caring guidance, and psychological support, special thanks are due to Pat Arneson, Ron Arnett, Art Bochner, John Bost, Melissa Cook, Annette Holba, Beth Hutchens, Lisa Keranen, Joe Fennell-Lowe, Nancy King, Seth Maheu, Ananda Mitra, Peter Rosenquist, Calvin Schrag, Joe Verga, and Eric Watts. I also thank those groups who heard earlier versions of some of my chapters at the University of South Florida and the University of South Carolina, as well as at Duquesne, Villanova, Wake Forest, and Yale universities. I am grateful to Wake Forest University for awarding me an Ethics, Leadership, and Social Responsibility grant that enabled me to complete the writing of certain sections of this book. And for their expertise and kindness, I wish to thank Carey Newman, Director, Baylor University Press, and those from whom I have received outstanding assistance in working with the Press: Abby Collier, Jenny Hunt, Karen Helgeson, and Diane Smith. x • Acknowledgments Chapters 3, 4, 6, 8, and 9 contain portions of previously published material: “Searching for Perfection: Martin Heidegger (With Some Help from Kenneth Burke) on Language, Truth, and the Practice of Rhetoric,” in Perspectives on Philosophy of Communication, edited by Pat Arneson (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2007), 23–36; “Coming to Terms with Perfection: The Case of Terri Schiavo” (with Sarah McSpiritt), Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 150–79; “Ethos and Rhetoric,”inTheInternationalEncyclopediaofCommunication, editedbyWolfgangDonsbach,vol.4(NewYork:Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 1604–6; and Perfection, Postmodern Culture, and the Biotechnology Debate (The Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, 2007) (New York: Pearson/Allyn & Bacon, 2009). Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors and publishers of this material for their permission to use it here. The present adaptation represents various degrees of revision and expansion of those first versions. ...