Walker Percy, Philosopher

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxi

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2. Introduction: Philosopher of Precision and Soul

   • Leslie Marsh

   Pages 1-20

3. Percy, Peirce, and Parsifal: Intuition’s Farther Shore

   • Stephen Utz

   Pages 21-40

4. Walker Percy, Phenomenology, and the Mystery of Language

   • Carolyn Culbertson

   Pages 41-61

5. That Mystery Category “Fourthness” and Its Relationship to the Work of C. S. Peirce

   • Stacey E. Ake

   Pages 63-87

6. Diamonds in the Rough: The Peirce-Percy Semiotic in The Second Coming

   • Karey Perkins

   Pages 89-113

7. Walker Percy’s Intersubjectivity: An Existential Semiotic or 3 + 3 = 4

   • Rhonda R. McDonnell

   Pages 115-132

8. To Take the Writer’s Meaning: An Unpublished Manuscript on “Peirce and Modern Semiotic” by Walker Percy

   • Kenneth Laine Ketner

   Pages 133-150

9. 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 R. Cunningham

   Pages 151-169

10. Percy’s Poetics of Dwelling: The Dialogical Self and the Ethics of Reentry in The Last Gentleman and Lost in the Cosmos

    • Christopher Yates

    Pages 171-196

11. “There Must Be a Place”: Walker Percy and the Philosophy of Place

    • Patrick L. Connelly

    Pages 197-213

12. On Being Jaded: Walker Percy’s Philosophical Contributions

    • Nathan P. Carson

    Pages 215-250

13. Percy on the Allure of Violence and Destruction

    • Brian A. Smith

    Pages 251-269

14. Back Matter

    Pages 271-280

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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.

• Peirce
• Chomsky
• Philosophy of Place
• Peirce and Modern Semiotic
• Heidegger

“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)

• International Academy of Pathology, The University of British Columbia Hospital, Vancouver, BC, Canada

  Leslie Marsh

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. 

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