percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy
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- From: "Parlin, Steven" <PARLINS AT culver.org>
- To: "'percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org'" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
- Subject: RE: [percy-l] Re: WP and MacIntyre
- Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 15:43:47 -0500
Fantastic Wonderful Terrific Fabulous Great At one time, these words --and others could be included here as well-- were separate in meaning. Now they are all but indistinguishable (I suspect in part due to the relatively recent rampage of "Nicespeak"). Not sure what Percy would have to say about it, but I'm sure he'd have attributed it to the word being evacuated of its meaning.
Just thought, I'd share this. It came up in clas today.
SP
-----Original
Message----- Peter, reading
your "Theological Reflections on MacIntyre's After Virtue" essay
on the site below gave rise to a few questions as to how Percy and Alasdair
MacIntyre intersect. I'd like to ask both you and the list if there is a
connection between the philosophies of the two writers and if so, how?
My
initial thoughts (and i have not finished After Virtue but have
read enough to know where he's headed) are that MacIntyre sees our ethical
crisis as precipitated by predominately external events - ie the
'cataclysm' of the last 300 years that has fractured our language and
vocabularly such that we are like kids dressed up as doctors attempting to
perform 'surgery', throwing around 'adult' words and concepts that have lost
their meaning and that we have no chance of understanding. Here he's talking
about scientists in a hypothetical culture after some sort of
world-war-inducing-cataclysm: "In such a
culture men would use expressions such as "neutrino", and "mass", specific
gravity", "atomic mass" in systematic and often interrelated ways which would
resemble in lesser or greater degrees the ways in which such expressions had
been used in earlier times before scientific knowledge had been largely lost.
But many of the beliefs presupposed by the use of these expressions would have
been lost and there would appear to be an element of arbitrariness and even of
choice in their application which would appear surprising to
us." Yet Percy
sees this ethical dilemma as more internal - a loss of existential identity. We
are not so much using tools we don't understand as focusing on our great
successes in science and technology, which gives us the vague yet hauntingly
empty feeling of 'progress' while our souls and our humanity
atrophe. I quoted
MacIntye from After Virtue here (taken from your article).
I'd love the list to comment on how this fits into Percy's views on
language and our ethical and theological crisis. Also, to those who haven't read
the first chapter of After Virtue, i'm not doing it justice.
-chad ----- Original Message
-----
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Thursday, February
06, 2003 12:33 PM Subject: [percy-l] WP and
Fukyama This article is only
obliquely about WP but I thought it might interest the list
members. Revd. Dr. Peter
Sellick, |
- RE: [percy-l] Re: WP and MacIntyre, Parlin, Steven, 02/22/2003
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