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…
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…
In view of the triumphant and generally admirable democratic-technological transformation of society, what is the ground of the novelist’s radical disquiet? Can the charge be brought against him, as Harvey Cox has accused the existentialists, of being an anachronism, one of the remnant of nineteenth-century “cultivated personalities” who, finding no sympathetic hearing from either technician…
Since true prophets, i.e., men called by God to communicate something urgent to other men, are currently in short supply, the novelist may perform a quasi-prophetic function. Like the prophet, his news is generally bad. Unlike the prophet, whose mouth has been purified by a burning coal, the novelist’s art is often bad, too. It…
NOTES FOR A NOVEL ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD A SERIOUS NOVEL about the destruction of the United States and the end of the world should perform the function of prophecy in reverse. The novelist writes about the coming end in order to warn about present ills and so avert the end. Not being…
A man riding a train may incarnate alienation (the commuter) or rotation (i. e., the English variety: “I was taking a long-delayed holiday. In the same compartment and directly opposite me, I noticed a young woman who seemed to be in some sort of distress. To my astonishment she beckoned to me. I had planned…
manwithoutqualities 