Rhetoric is a multidimensional discipline in which theory, practice, logic, psychology, linguistics, and the behavior and intentions of the speaker and the listener all come together.  Thus in the crossroads of the rhetorical phenomenon one can find the wholeness of the human person.

To delve deeper into this world of unity in diversity, the Rhetoric and Anthropology Research Center has been formed within the Communication Department of the University of the Holy Cross.  The founding members are Rafael Jiménez Cataño and Sergio Tapia Velasco (from the University of the Holy Cross), Adelino Cattani (of the University of Padua), and Alberto Gil and Marco Agnetta (from Saarlan University) all of whom are active in the world of rhetoric, working diversely in various fields such as argumentation, debate, pragmatics, conversation, musical rhetoric, public speaking and fundamental rhetoric. 

The chosen methodological focus could be called “ecological” because, going beyond references made to the environment and to nature, rhetoric has to do with those goods born of the relationships between human beings and between them and their surroundings, relationships in which not all of what one wants to do and one can do is to find a place necessarily in mankind’s agenda.  In rhetorical life, therefore, communicative ends and a sense of responsibility come together.  This conscience works on two levels: one connected to the will to share what has been perceived as a good and to reach a minimum of consensus, “surviving” in debates, and another that seeks for harmony in conflict, that does not deny the objective of concord among interlocutors, which, no matter how difficult it seems, should be considered –or at least it would be good to consider it first- possible and desirable.

The research center is open to collaboration with all those fields, speculative, practical or poetic, influenced by communicative dimensions.

Download the Rhetoric and Anthropology Research Center's Manifesto

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