Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[Mike Frentz <mfrentz AT bbn.com>]

Greetings!

I just joined the group so, in keeping with the suggestions, here's a brief 
introduction.

I'm a physicist/electrical engineer who discovered Percy through the Catholic 
Authors show on EWTN.  My work in the last
few years has been focused on more computer science driven areas, e.g. 
information security, which has led me down a
much more philosophical path than I would have guessed.  In order to protect 
information, it would certainly be nice to
be able to define what information is.  A Shannon-based information theory 
has nothing to do with the kind of
information, biologists and anthropologists (e.g Bateson) talks about.  Been 
interested in biosemiotics, and quantum
information (my company is doing a little bit in quantum cryptography).  The 
link to extraordinary physicists (e.g.
Bohm, Wheeler, Deutsch) and theoretical biologists (e.g. Kauffman) is very 
intriguing.   Also have been reading a lot of
theology works (Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Peter Kreeft, Frank 
Sheed).

It was quite a surprise to find Percy's semiotics nugget buried in Lost in 
the Cosmos.  Which has led me to studying
Peirce (and now even drifting towards Duns Scotus and Ockham).  Having been a 
geek all my life, I now have a whole new
respect for classical liberal studies (inspired mainly by Chesterton).   I am 
trying to make up for that deficit in my
education.

I do have a question for the group.  In the Epilogue of Signposts (p. 394 of 
the Picador edition), Percy in 1987 talks
of his plan to "write a short work on semiotics, showing how the current 
discipline has been screwed up by followers of
Charles Peirce and Saussure" (by this he was referring to "errant apostles" 
of Peirce).  My question is, does anyone in
the group know if the work he refers to was ever written?

If the work wasn't written, could someone give me some pointers to 
contemporary semioticians whose work he does respect?
(Langer and Cassirer are on my list).   I've been through Cosmos, Message in 
a Bottle, and Signposts -- I'm hoping
there's some more recent (e.g. post 1975) pointers from Percy on worthwhile 
semiotics research that I haven't yet
discovered..


Best regards,
Mike Frentz





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