Though Walker Percy is best known as a novelist, he was first and foremost a philosopher. This collection offers a sustained examination of key aspects to his more technical philosophy (primarily semiotics and the philosophy of language) as well as some of his lesser known philosophical interests, including the philosophy of place and dislocation. Contributors expound upon Percy¿s multifaceted philosophy, an invitation to literature and theology scholars as well as to philosophers who may not be familiar with the philosophical underpinnings of his work.

Focuses on Walker Percy as a philosopher, rather than as a novelist

Foreword: Percy: The Wondering Physician-Philosopher.- 1. Introduction: Philosopher of Precision and Soul.- 2. Percy, Peirce and Parsifal: Intuition's Farther Shore.- 3. Walker Percy, Phenomenology, and the Mystery of Language.- 4. That Mystery Category "Fourthness" and Its Relationship to the Work of C. S. Peirce.- 5. Diamonds in the Rough: The Peirce-Percy Semiotic inThe Second Coming.6. Walker Percy's Intersubjectivity: An Existential Semiotic or 3 + 3 = 4.- 7. To Take the Writer's Meaning: An Unpublished Manuscript onPeirce and Modern Semioticby Walker Percy.- 8. An Attempt Toward A Natural/UnNatural History of The Lay-Scientific Interface or How Walker Percy Got on the Way to Becoming a Radical (Anthropologist).- 9. Percy's Poetics of Dwelling: The Dialogical Self and the Ethics of Reentry inThe Last GentlemanandLost in the Cosmos.10. "There Must Be a Place": Walker Percy and the Philosophyof Place.- 11. On Being Jaded: Walker Percy's Philosophical Contributions.- 12. Percy on the Allure of Violence and Destruction.