Walker Percy, Philosopher

by Leslie Marsh (Editor)

Overview

Though Walker Percy is best known as a novelist, he was first and foremost a philosopher. This collection offers a sustained examination of key aspects to his more technical philosophy (primarily semiotics and the philosophy of language) as well as some of his lesser known philosophical interests, including the philosophy of place and dislocation. Contributors expound upon Percy’s multifaceted philosophy, an invitation to literature and theology scholars as well as to philosophers who may not be familiar with the philosophical underpinnings of his work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319779676
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	07/31/2018
Edition description:	1st ed. 2018
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Leslie Marsh is with the International Academy of Pathology based at The University of British Columbia Medical School, Canada. He is the co-founder of the philosophy journal EPISTEME, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism and is the editor of books on Adam Smith, Herbert Simon, Friedrich Hayek, and Michael Oakeshott.

Table of Contents

Foreword
• Richard Gunderman
The significance of Walker Percy from the perspective of a practising medical clinician and philosopher-ethicist.


1. Introducing Walker Percy: Philosopher of Precision and Soul
• Leslie MarshAn overview of Percy’s life and work.


2. Percy, Peirce and Parsifal: Intuition’s Farther Shore
• Stephen Utz
An examination of Percy’s understanding of Peirce and Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis.


3. Walker Percy, Phenomenology, and the Mystery of Language
• Carolyn Culbertson
An emphasis on Heidegger and the philosophy of language.


4. That Mystery Category “Fourthness” and Its Relationship to the Work of C. S. Peirce
• Stacey E. Ake
Percy, Pierce, semiotics and phenomenology.


5. Diamonds in the Rough: The Peirce-Percy Semiotic in The Second Coming
• Karey Perkins
Emphasizing the Peirce-Percy semiotic in Percy’s fiction.


6. Walker Percy’s Intersubjectivity: An Existential Semiotic or 3 + 3 = 4
• Rhonda McDonnell
Emphasizing the existentialist-type semiotic in Percy’s work.


7. A Hard Fact of Life: A Commentary on Percy’s “Peirce and Modern Semiotic”
• Kenneth Laine Ketner
The doyen of Peirce-Percy studies examines a heretofore unpublished Percy MS.


8. 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
Excavating Percy’s attempt at a scientific-philosophical anthropology.


9. Percy’s Poetics of Dwelling: The Dialogical Self and the Ethics of Reentry in The Last
Gentleman and Lost in the Cosmos
• Christopher Yates
An examination of Existential authenticity in one novel and in a prominent last work of non-fiction.


10. Placement, Nonplacement, Displacement: Walker Percy and the Philosophy of Place
• Patrick Connelly
Discussion of situated beings and the relation to social identity and personhood.


11. Jadedness, Appreciation, and Humility: Walker Percy’s Philosophical Contributions
• Nathan Carson
Percy on psychological jadedness and its theological-philosophical-epistemic implications.

12. Percy on the Allure of Violence and Destruction
• Brian A. Smith
Discussion of socio-cultural alienation in Percy’s work.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“For Walker Percy, philosophy and fiction were both tools for diagnosing the human condition, just as his medical training had taught him about the tools for diagnosing the human body. His aim was nothing less than trying to understand how we fit into the cosmos. This collection of essays is a fascinating and worthy exploration of how philosophy informed his novels and the religious and existential quest that he called ‘the search.’ I can imagine him reading this book, with his wry smile and lightly worn grace, nodding appreciatively.” (Walter Isaacson, Professor of History, Tulane University, USA, and biographer of Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Benjamin Franklin)