Walker Percy, Philosopher

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.

Foreword: Percy: The Wondering Physician-Philosopher.- 1. Introduction: Philosopher of Precision and Soul.- 2. Percy, Peirce and Parsifal: Intuition’s Farther Shore.- 3. Walker Percy, Phenomenology, and the Mystery of Language.- 4. That Mystery Category “Fourthness” and Its Relationship to the Work of C. S. Peirce.- 5. Diamonds in the Rough: The Peirce-Percy Semiotic in The Second Coming.- 6. Walker Percy’s Intersubjectivity: An Existential Semiotic or 3 + 3 = 4.- 7. To Take the Writer's Meaning: An Unpublished Manuscript on Peirce and Modern Semiotic by Walker Percy.- 8.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).- 9. Percy’s Poetics of Dwelling: The Dialogical Self and the Ethics of Reentry in The Last Gentleman and Lost in the Cosmos.- 10. “There Must Be a Place”: Walker Percy and the Philosophyof Place.- 11. On Being Jaded: Walker Percy’s Philosophical Contributions.- 12. Percy on the Allure of Violence and Destruction.

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.