Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence by Jessica Hooten Wilson

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 263-266
Author(s):  
Gary M. Ciuba
Keyword(s):  
Walker Percy ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky

Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome, New York: Farrar-Straus Giroux, 1987

Moreana ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 28 (Number 108) (4) ◽  
pp. 115-116
Author(s):  
Germain Marc’hadour
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Walker Percy

Minds, Machines, and Giving a Damn

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Chodat
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Walker Percy ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Partial Success ◽  
The Way

The 1960s saw the triumph of cognitive science over behaviorism. This chapter examines three literary–philosophical objections to this shift: “West Coast” phenomenology, Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, and the writings of Walker Percy, the first of the postwar sages featured in this book. For “West Coast” philosophers, cognitive science ignores the way human action is structured by what we “give a damn” about—a sense of significance that orients our actions. Powers’s novel goes a step further: no more than machines do we know what to give a damn about. Percy’s essays and fiction challenge both these positions, asking us to see analogies between the significance we find in language and the significance we find in living a Christian life. Establishing such an analogy is the goal of Percy’s 1971 Love in the Ruins, which seeks to embody—with only partial success—what terms such as “faith” and “community” might mean.

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