[percy-l] walker percy dissertation?
KMitch2626 at aol.com
KMitch2626 at aol.com
Thu Nov 3 00:04:29 EST 2005
Father Burns,
I once attempted such a project. But to make a very long story short, after
many committee changes, life problems, and several rewrites, i ultimately put
my dissertation aside and started a new life outside of academia. My only
regret is that my work would have been a perfect resource for persons such as your
self. Towards the end of my work i found all of Ketner's writing to be the
most helpful on the subject. (even kinda had him on my committee at one time). I
still have the roiginal abstract, although it doesnt quite capture where i
ended up. I'll send you that at the bottom of this text. I'll also try to dig
through some of my disks and see if there is any info i can share with you and
others interested on the listserve. I lost a lot of my work due to a hard drive
failure. but i think i still have some of the rough drafts of some of the
capters lying around. if nothing else, they could give you some ideas and some
good references to look at. Much of the philosophical work at the time, only
dealt with Percy and Keirkegaard. Mine focused more on Peirce and Percy. Its
definitely a project that needs to be done. However, i'm not in a spot right now to
finish it. Also, I think if i ever were to try such a thing again, I'd simply
revise/rewrite Lost in the cosmos. Bring it up to date, and change some of
the stuff in the semioitc primer section. Let me see what if anything i can dig
up for you, if you and others are interested.
somewhere lost in the cosmos,
ken mitchell
DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
Along with the rise of the natural sciences, there has been an increasing
attempt to apply empirical methodologies to the study of human beings. This
scientific approach has generated a wealth of fruitful insights into human nature
and the workings of the
human body. However, there has been a long-standing debate within philosophy
over the limits and applicability of empirical methodologies to the study of
human beings. Many philosophers have argued, and I think quite convincingly,
that scientific approaches yield necessary but not sufficient explanations and
understandings of human activity. Instead, they suggest the need to implement a
plurality of methodological approaches to persons. Hermeneutics,
phenomenology, and narrative for example, are just some of the varying methods that
philosophers are increasingly turning towards to study the self. Walker Percy,
perhaps best known for his
fiction, developed in his philosophical writings a philosophy of the self
which addresses these issues. He develops a non-Cartesian, semiotic account of
the self which critiques empirical and reductionistic approaches to the self,
and sets forth a theoretical foundation for the use of other methodologies,
especially narrative. Percy's theory emphasizes the constitutive role of
language in the formation of the self, along with the self's intersubjective and
narrative structure. His theory is especially interesting in that it is built upon
the metaphysics, epistemology, and semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, which
until recently, have been seen by many Peirce scholars as philosophically
inadequate for building a useful theory of subjectivity. My dissertation first
explicates the elements of Peirce's philosophy that Percy employs, and then
presents a systematic account of how Percy uses these elements to construct a
semiotic account of the self.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/attachments/20051103/2f4bbb8f/attachment.html>
More information about the Percy-L
mailing list