Mending the Cartesian Rift: Walker Percy on Being Human

Colloquium Archives - Lyceum Institute

The colloquium lecture delivered in December 2020 by Kirk Kanzelberger, PhD “Mending the Cartesian Rift: Walker Percy on Being Human” is now available to the public. You can listen or download below (full lecture at the bottom). Please consider supporting the Lyceum Institute if you enjoy this lecture! The Lyceum Institute is currently fundraising for 2022 to support the pursuit of philosophy and dedicated thinkers like Dr. Kanzelberger in their research, teaching, and publications.

Mending the Cartesian Rift: Walker Percy on Being Human

Dr. Kirk Kanzelberger

Preview – Dr. Kirk Kanzelberger: Mending the Cartesian Rift: Walker Percy on Being Human

“Our view of the world, which we get consciously or unconsciously from modern science, is radically incoherent,” argues Walker Percy in “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind.” The dualism of Descartes — the rift between man as psyche and man as organism — continues to pervade our inherited view of the world and scientific practice. And yet it was a century ago and more that Charles Sanders Peirce indicated the road to a more coherent anthropology based upon the crucial datum of the triadic sign-relation that unites “mental” and “physical” in one single natural event.

This lecture explores Percy’s argument and its background in the thought of Descartes and Peirce, and provides an assessment of this final public articulation by Percy concerning the issues that preoccupied him as a writer: the contemporary predicament of the human being, lost in the cosmos that it understands more and more, while understanding itself less and less.

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