Born on this date. I don’t recall this rare bit of Percyana ever being mentioned by Rhoda Faust. Most appropriately entitled Diagnosing the Modern Malaise it was published by Rhoda’s imprint in 1985 and is one of only 250 numbered copies signed by Percy (with 50 others on special paper) and is listed with various antiquarian booksellers at…
AFTER READING Feeling and Form, Susanne Langer’s extraordinary work on aesthetics, one inevitably goes back to her earlier book Philosophy in a New Key, of which according to the author the former is the companion volume — not just to get one’s bearings in the general semiotic on which the aesthetic is based, but in…
What has this to do with existentialism? We will pass over the epistemological consequences of symbolic knowing, the possession of the thing by the symbol rather than adaptation by signal-a knowing which is indeed existential in the broad sense of knowing something by being something-and go at once to the more typical existentialia. The recognition…
A meditation on writer Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, opens at The Front Gallery in the St. Claude Arts District. existentialismJared Raglandnew orleansphilosophical literaturephotographythe moviegoerWalker Percy
IF IT IS TRUE that both Anglo-American empiricism and European existentialism contain valid insights, then in respect of the failure to make a unifying effort toward giving an account of all realities, the former is surely the worse offender. For the existentialists do take note of empirical science, if only to demote it to some…
Hot on the heels of Jessica’s fine Search for Influence comes this book. jessica hooten wilsonphilosophical literatureWalker Percy
SYMBOL AND CONSCIOUSNESS The selective and intentional character of consciousness has been stressed by empiricists and phenomenologists alike. The conscious act is always intentional: One is never simply conscious, but conscious of this or that. Consciousness is, in fact, defined by the phenomenologist as noematic intentionality in general. But quite as essential to the act…
THERE ARE two interesting things about current approaches to consciousness as a subject of inquiry. One is that the two major approaches, the explanatory-psychological and the phenomenological, go their separate ways, contributing nothing to each other. They do not tend to converge upon or supplement each other as do, say, atomic theory and electromagnetic theory.…
Doug and Caren talk Walker Percy and the vagaries of the self in our age. (H/T Brian Smith). a confederacy of duncesamnesiaCatholicismcomplexityjay tolsonJohn Kennedy Toolelost in the cosmospersonal identityphilosophical literaturePhilosophyThe Message in the Bottlethe moviegoerWalker Percy
THE SOURCE OF THE ANTINOMY The general source of the antinomy is not to be found, as is sometimes alleged, in the nature of the subject, man, the culture member who practices science but needs myths. Such an anthropology is in the last analysis incoherent because it requires two sorts of men, scientists who observe…
manwithoutqualities 