Walker Percy, Philosopher (9)

walker percy

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 the nature of the symbol in linguistics, sociology, philosophy, theology, and anthropology, but to no avail. Percy had “been at some pains to sketch out an ‘anthropology,’ a theory of man” and hoped to use “CSP’s ‘ontology’ of Secondness and Thirdness (not Firstness) as the ground for a more or less scientific introduction to a philosophical anthropology.” Taking his word that he had been working on such a project and finding no singular work of Percy containing such a sketch suggests that its components might be found scattered throughout his writing. The purpose of this essay is not to provide a possible entire account of his sketch but instead to examine one clear major component of that sketch, “The Lay-Scientific Interface.”

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Tragic Sense Of Life

Miguel de Unamuno

One doesn’t have to be Catholic, an existentialist, Spanish, nor indeed even a “believer” of any sort, to appreciate Miguel de Unamuno. One only needs an appreciation of a distinctive quality of mind — but that intellectual virtue, what with the prevailing lazy abridgments characteristic of ideologues, usually squawking the loudest — is in short supply these days. Though Tragic Sense of Life is feely available here for a very modest $14.95 it is well worth getting the hardcopy from the wonderful Dover Press. Much like Liberty Fund Press, Dover offers classics that are exceedingly well-bound and well-priced. Unamuno’s stance as a public intellectual (i. e. with skin-in-the game), makes a nonsense of those (albeit bright, but hardly wise) wankers that typically populate contemporary academia — folk who try so hard to be provocative and who ostensibly are fighting the underdog’s corner. You know, the arrogant, the rude, and the pompous who want to escape the “Nazi USA” and who would have public funds earmarked to set up a university-based centre here in Canada — in their name! Yeah, right oh! Whatever else the failings of university beaurocraps, even they didn’t fall for this con.

Miguel de Unamuno

Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Review)

enactivism

Rick Grush’s review of Shaun’s Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

enactivist-interventions

Pathologizing Ideology, Epistemic Modesty and Instrumental Rationality

ideology, rationality

Below is my preferred (and crisper) abstract, which for some reason, the typesetters overlooked along with some other stuff. Anyway, the chapter is to be found here.

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Walker Percy, Philosopher (8)

walker percy

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 essay, “Peirce and Modern Semiotic (1959),” presented here, shows that Percy was well ahead of his contemporaries in understanding the scientific and philosophical importance of Peirce’s Semeiotic, the Theory of Semeioses. Percy particularly pointed to the experiential importance of “taking the other’s meaning.” He regarded that common phenomenon as vital, and genuine—a kind of event that behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner or Charles Morris explained away as nothing but a dynamic dyadic causal (or S-R) process. Percy’s essay definitively blocks those reductions.

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Rob Haskell

robert haskell

Today marks the death of my chum Rob Haskell. With hindsight, so much of what Rob told me in his last two years (in person and telephonically) reveals just how profoundly hurt he was: a hurt perpetrated not just by departmental bullies but also by a cowardly lack of gumption in coming to his defence — or as Captain Haddock would say: “Lily-livered landlubbers!” Rob’s crime you may ask? Simply that he was an “unfashionable old white blue-collar male who was just taking up space!” This very unpretentious, kind and gentle soul was thrown to ravenous hyenas that were encircling. The upside to all this (insofar as there is one) is that they will come to tear bits off each other as they are wont to do when on the back foot — and these days they are. This will make for a karma cake with schadenfreude icing.

 

David Murray

Leibnitz

I was lucky enough to have had David Murray as one of my tutors at Birkbeck who I’ve only just discovered, died two years ago (I don’t think I’d any idea that he was originally a Canuck). Here is his obituary in the FT and Toocool2betrue along with a squib from the Edmonton Journal, and so far as I can tell, not a peep emanating from Birkbeck. (David’s sister, Jan Murray died soon after). I’d often wondered whatever became of David since thirty years on, I still harbour very fond memories of our tutorials — long-form conversations on Leibniz on identity and on music in general, always accompanied by a snifter or two from a bottle strategically hidden behind a book on his office book shelf (one would be sent to the gulag for such behaviour these days!). Though I can’t say I knew David well, he struck me as a very patient, gentle, fair, cultivated and, above all, a thoroughly decent chap — virtues in short supply these days. The departmental rumour-mill was that he was pushed out ostensibly because he wasn’t publishing: others more privy to the departmental machinations have told me that the real reason was that “they” resented his having the FT as a parallel gig. Do people not realize that this regressive sour grapes power-grab has being going on now for at least 30 years? Anyway, I raise a glass to the memory of David.

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Microblogging and stigmergy

stigmergy

Yet another article that detects a stigmergic dynamic within a digital domain, namely microblogging, made freely available via Sensors.

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Walker Percy, Philosopher (7)

walker percy

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 in a study of schizophrenics, and his investigation of a broad range of thinkers from the disciplines of science, psychiatry, anthropology, semiotics, and philosophy. Percy’s Existential semiotic predates that of Eero Tarasti, which was independently developed at the turn of the twenty-first century. For Percy, using an Existential Semiotic provides a triadic science in place of traditional binary science. Using this triadic model, he analyzes human communication in terms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, self and other, authenticity and inauthenticity. Ultimately, McDonnell asserts that Percy’s goal is to posit intersubjectivity as a means to address and potentially heal issues of identity and alienation.

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