Familiarity, so the saying goes, breeds contempt. But, why should familiarity breed such a negative thing as contempt, or other negative orientations? Walker Percy, it would seem, has a lot to say about human jadedness, sometimes through the very means by which we are meant to inhabit ontological intimacy. One may not care much about, say sparrows, but intuitively people seem jaded about something that matters to them in a deeper way. This chapter explores the personal or social sources of (...) jadedness: is it an individual problem only, or caused by broader cultural factors? I attempt to sketch an initial theory of jadedness, and then expand that theory by attending to Percy’s unique philosophical contributions. I will argue, that there are at least two types of jadedness—a narrow, domain-specific psychological type and a global, existential type—that share structural similarities such as volitional and epistemic inertia, an unsettled loss of meaning, a faulty assumption of epistemic completion or superiority, and a foreclosure of ontological possibilities. I then show how Percy uniquely integrates these two types of jadedness within a broader framework of what it means to be human. (shrink)

In this article, I probe the extent of Kierkegaard's skepticism and irrationalism by examining the nature and limits of his “objective” and “approximate” knowledge. I argue that, for Kierkegaard, certain objective knowledge of contingent being is impossible and “approximate” knowledge of the same is funded by the volitional passion of belief. But, while Kierkegaard endorses severe epistemic restrictions, he rejects wholesale skepticism, allowing for genuine “approximate” knowledge of mind-independent reality. However, I further argue that we cannot ignore his criticisms of (...) such knowledge because of its intrinsic dangers, and because epistemic limitations are crucial in developing religious selfhood before God. (shrink)

In his book Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, Peter J. Conradi suggests that “a task for critics today would seem to be to understand the indebtedness of her demonic, tormented sinners and saints and of the curious coexistence in her work of malevolence and goodness, to the dark tragi-comedies of Dostoevski.”1 In his 1986 essay “Iris Murdoch and Dostoevskii,” Conradi goes even further to argue that Fyodor Dostoevsky has been “unnoticed by commentators, a hovering or brooding presence for (...) at least two decades.”2 Both here and in his book Fyodor Dostoevsky, Conradi demonstrates “convergence” through a number of remarkable similarities: the parallels between Dostoevsky’s holy... (shrink)