Peirce believed that there are two kinds of natural phenomena. First there are those events which involve “dyadic relations,” such as obtain in the “physical forces . . . between pairs of particles.” The other kind of event entails “triadic relations”: All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place…
Coming soon existentialismjessica hooted wilsonphilosophical literaturePhilosophy of LanguageWalker Percy
IT IS A MATTER for astonishment, when one comes to think of it, how little use linguistics and other sciences of language are to psychiatrists. When one considers that the psychiatrist spends most of his time listening and talking to patients, one might suppose that there would be such a thing as a basic science of listening-and-talking, as indispensable to…
H/T Brian Smith. Charlie Clark in Fare Forward. One of Percy’s most lost characters speaks more truly than he knows: “I like your banal little cathedral in the Vieux Carré. It is set down squarely in the midst of the greatest single concentration of drunks, drugheads, whores, pimps, queers, sodomists in the hemisphere. But isn’t that where…
The longer we think about it, the more mysterious the simplest act of naming becomes. It is, we begin to realize, quite without precedent in all of natural history as we know it. But so, you might reply, is the emergence of the eye without precedent, so is sexual reproduction without precedent. These are nevertheless…
Having just finished Brian’s book Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer (which I’ll discuss at length in a forthcoming review essay), I was very pleased to come across Brian’s lovely podcast discussion with Richard Reinsch at the Law & Liberty blog. Brian’s exposition of Percy is a paragon of clarity and thus makes for a most reliable overview. (His…
THE MYSTERY OF LANGUAGE LANGUAGE IS an extremely mysterious phenomenon. By mysterious I do not mean that the events which take place in the brain during an exchange of language are complex and little understood-although this is true too. I mean, rather, that language, which at first sight appears to be the most familiar sort…
Faye reading Love in the Ruins, 1976, photographed by Terry O’Neill. faye dunawaylove in the ruinsphotographyterry o’neillWalker Percy
Still on Percy I was very disappointed that I missed last year’s shindig! So check out this brief trailer and to keep apprised of the weekend’s emerging details, I suggest one signup here. Louisiananew orleansphilosophical literaturePhilosophyWalker PercyWalker Percy Weekend
The American Christian novelist faces a peculiar dilemma today. (I speak, of course, of a dilemma of the times and not of his own personal malaise, neuroses, failures, to which he is at least as subject as his good heathen colleagues, sometimes I think more so.) His dilemma is that though he professes a belief…
manwithoutqualities 