Walker Percy's new-old book: 'Symbol and Existence' A Must-Read...

[Gary Goldberg]

I just started reading this book which has been re-edited, reviewed and revised by a distinguished group of Peircean 'Pragmaticists' ...  it is very hard to put it down.  

for details, see:

https://www.mupress.org/Symbol-and-Existence-A-Study-in-Meaning-Explorations-of-Human-Nature-P1016.aspx

I think Walker Percy is/was a man with a huge heart, a man of faith, an abiding love of humanity, and a vision of where things have gone wrong and how they need to be corrected.  I have been taken by his approach ever since I listened to his 1989 Jefferson Lecture to the National Endowment on the Humanities in the USA called 'The Fateful Rift'.  All about the fact that our modern worldview is fundamentally INCOHERENT.precisely because of its Cartesian dualism and its related Nominalism and Materialism that actually undermine an open approach to scientific discovery and also undermine moral judgment and action, encouraging the continuing growth of what CS Peirce called the 'Gospel of Greed'  fed by an unmediated position dominated by what Peirce termed 'Necessitarianism', a position that denies the reality of potentiality, much as does Nominalism...  You can find links to the lecture and to the related essay from this webpage...

https://manwithoutqualities.com/2014/04/23/the-san-andreas-fault-in-the-modern-mind/

CS Peirce let us know this back when he published one of his earlier essays, 'Some Consequences of Four Incapacities'...  published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1868...  

See:  http://www.peirce.org/writings/p27.html

WHERE WOULD WE BE NOW IF PEOPLE HAD ACTUALLY TAKEN PEIRCE"S MESSAGE TO HEART?

Nietzsche was also trying to tell us the very same thing about where this runaway train was heading!!!

Is it possible that we might be willing to listen carefully to Walker Percy now and respond?  I don't know.  For the sake of my grandchildren, I certainly hope so.

[J. McCarty]

Dear Gary,

thank you so much for providing this to the community ( as I will here remind as courtesy : this is not my usual experimental sand box , so I am especially grateful for these historical contexts ). I am incorporating both Percy and Peirce in my researches as I continue to explore the fascinating consequences of the physics and maths I can describe that unfolded and seem to allow a robust objective realism ( described in previous posts here on this worthy forum ).

I have had only a few minutes to peruse between other thoughts and duties , but , it seems to me that Peirce had , piercing ( pun pardon please ;) insights into the concept that thoughts , ideas , are projections that are composed of three agents. This is a key insight and has been missing. However , what I have not yet seen discussed is something that will soon be of timely relevance and that is regarding concepts in artificial intelligence ( AI ). The concern that I have seen arise in the maths relate to what happens should we consider the extrapolation , as might be possible , with going to the extension of diadic to triadic to -- what I am going to suggest is forbidden territory , for reasons that can be articulated. And may be subject of some ancient poetry ; I leave that for folks to consider for themselves - pointing only to that information as discussed in some of my recent blogs https://www.eidolononesuch.com/my-blog - as the topics , tho perhaps timely , are rather tangential to this forum.