Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher. Percy’s Poetics of Dwelling: The Dialogical Self and the Ethics of Reentry in The Last Gentleman and Lost in the Cosmos Christopher Yates Christopher Yates explores how two of Walker Percy’s seminal texts call us to practice self-examination in a way that seeks to overcome deceptive clarities in our lives. It is…
Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher. An Attempt Toward a Natural/Unnatural History of The Lay-Scientific Interface or How Walker Percy Got on the Way to Becoming a Radical (Anthropologist) Scott Cunningham Walker Percy was singularly focused on understanding the structure of symbolic behavior, what he called one of the “essential features of symbolic knowing.” Percy sought understanding of…
Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher. To Take the Writer’s Meaning: An Unpublished Manuscript on “Peirce and Modern Semiotic” by Walker Percy Kenneth Laine Ketner Percy has been studied under several headings: Catholic, Southerner, Existentialist. Two such aspects, however, have been neglected: the strong influence of Charles Sanders Peirce, plus Percy’s deep competence in laboratory science. His typescript…
Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher. Walker Percy’s Intersubjectivity: An Existential Semiotic or 3 + 3 = 4 Rhonda McDonnell Rhonda McDonnell argues that Walker Percy’s self-described “radical anthropology” is properly understood as Existentialist semiotics. The cornerstone of this anthropology is his concept of intersubjectivity, which was developed through his examination of language development in humans, his participation…
Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher. Diamonds in the Rough: The Peirce-Percy Semiotic in The Second Coming Karey Perkins Karey Perkins makes the case for the view that Percy is more than a novelist with occasional random existential musings or themes. Although Percy begins in existentialism, his coming across semiotics sparked Percy’s interest in language as the uniquely…
Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher. That Mystery Category “Fourthness” and Its Relationship to the Work of C. S. Peirce by Stacey Ake C. S. Peirce posits that the self is known only through negation—by the knower finding out that he or she is wrong. Even more importantly he considers a man to be nothing more than a sign.…
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,…
Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher. Percy, Peirce, and Parsifal: Intuition’s Farther Shore by Stephen Utz Walker Percy’s unusual aspirations set his novels apart from most literary attempts to understand profound human problems. He gave meaning to the category of art as inquiry. In the novels, his characters’ eccentric quests treat everyday things as evidence for abstract and…
Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher. Philosopher of Precision and Soul by Leslie Marsh The theme of abstraction operates in a twofold way in Percy – abstraction in the sense of being alienated from ones true or more authentic way of being/self and abstraction in a methodological sense, the inherent abstraction of scientific method and the more vulgar…
This marks the first of a series of extracts from the forthcoming Walker Percy, Philosopher. Percy: The Wondering Physician-Philosopher by Richard Gunderman Percy did not advocate an abandonment of science, but he did see the need for another way of knowing, or at least another means of investigation – one that recognized the possibility of a different…
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