Walker Percy, philosopher (4)

walker percy

Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher.

Walker Percy, Phenomenology, and the Mystery of Language

by Carolyn Culbertson

In his theoretical essays on language, Walker Percy criticizes contemporary linguistics for overlooking the deep, existential impact that language acquisition has on human life. This acquisition, for Percy, radically transforms the human being’s mode of existence. With the acquisition of language, the world and our role in it change. The meaning of the world comes to be revealed through the ongoing life of human discourse: through books, conversations, philosophical inquiry, and so on. This chapter clarifies and elaborates on Percy’s critique by showing how it arises as a central insight in twentieth-century German phenomenology, particularly in the later work of Martin Heidegger and in the hermeneutic phenomenology of Heidegger’s student, Hans-Georg Gadamer.

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CONSERVATISM: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

roger scruton

Published today.

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Acquiring the rudiments of morality in child play

Marc Champagne

Episode 15 of Marc’s series of podcasts. For an overview of Marc’s work see his website.

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Breadfan

music

The original version of Breadfan with a snippet of Winston Churchill’s famous acceptance speech included (subsequently deleted for copyright reasons). There is a dearth of good articles about Budgie but this is the best one I’ve come across.

Budgie’s fanatical grass-roots following was in total contrast to the slating they regularly suffered from the music press.

Adam Smith

adam smith

Marking the birth of the gentle professor.

In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.

 

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The Regulation of Language

spontaneous order

Here’s a most interesting article that reemphasizes the functional beauty of the Anglophone tradition of common law and language. As Givati points out, English, be it “BBC standard” or Jamaican (and everything in between), is essentially of a distributed character. This is one of the reasons why English is so adaptable (science and business), so culturally rich, and as a consequence so closely associated with individual liberty. All this is lost on the various varieties of vulgar rationalist: i.e. those behind Bill C-16 in Canada (still in Canada, check out the fuckwittery of this); the euphemistic Newspeak impulse of the “religion of peace” dhimmis; and the new-fangled fundamentalism of the “cultural appropriation” squawkers. Their relentless flattening of the socio-cultural landscape inevitably embodies an authoritarian tendency — since they are pissing in the wind, how else could they effect policy? They will of course double down but they will eventually be hoisted by their own petard through their own takfir-like purity tests.

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