Like the way society was caught in an eye for an eye mutual blindness, until someone invented forgiveness. — unenlightened
That's a fairly small snapshot — Vera Mont
But I am waving vaguely at a story, not a fact about the world. — unenlightened
History is broken and remade by - fiction? That much is undeniable. And that is worth consideration by any philosopher. — unenlightened
This is to say, if we can find deeper truths in fiction, surely we can do the same with non-fiction. — Hanover
Science doesn't have a monopoly on analysis of the world, — Hanover
but the world is as much subject to literary analysis as are the creations of our minds — Hanover
The point is often missed that fiction and truth are not opposites. The point of most fiction, or at least the well written sort, is that it contains much truth.
That is where most truth, or at least the wisdom sort, is found. — Hanover
People nowadays think, scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians etc. to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them — Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
It’s kind of frightening that the idea of artistic truth seems so alien to people now. Worthy of a separate discussion I’d think. — Jamal
And an offshoot of theism, which is that there is an intentional creator, is that the non-fiction is as much a creation as the human fiction, allowing both the same sort of analysis. That is, read the tales of your life as you would a novel. — Hanover
the world could not exist without you — Hanover
And none of this requires some leap of faith. It's just a perspective (either culturally instilled or by personal decision) of how you look at things. — Hanover
Does it follow from this that the creator is created too? Anyway, as you might expect, I’d go a bit further and say that the creator is also a fiction. A meaningful one. — Jamal
What I meant was the social situation in which it is the means that are susceptible to rationality, rather than the ends. — Jamal
At the personal level, ends may remain paramount, but these tend to be seen as subjective, a matter of taste or whatever. — Jamal
At the social level, political parties campaign on how best to run the economy, not on what kind of economy there should be—and there too, ends may remain paramount (winning elections for the party, profits for owners of capital) but the rationality of basing a society on the profit motive is not questioned, thus the ends here are unexamined. — Jamal
What ‘truths’ do we find in scripture? I can see how parables are like fables. But in relation to Christianity, I can make no use out of sacrifice and resurrection. You? — Tom Storm
But the thing that springs to mind is Adorno’s notion of the non-identical. There is always something about the object (a pair of boots, a gas station, marriage, or the Russian aristocracy) that escapes our concepts (and thus escapes science), and yet is not necessarily always perceptible merely by sitting there looking at it or by contemplating it. This is where art comes in: to give shape to this experience. That’s roughly the idea. — Jamal
Perhaps if I went back and performed textual analysis I could come up with something, but off the top of my head, no. I cannot precisely formulate anything I learned from reading those works. — Janus
On the other hand, I don't agree about "synthetic" or "fake" experiences. I don't think they are this and would have trouble imagining what a "fake experience" could be. You can say, afterwards, that your judgement about an experience was mistaken, the experience itself wasn't false. — Manuel
In my opinion, for someone to have a REAL religious experience, the supernatural would have to be real.But there's also plenty of people who have a religious experience that don't do extreme things. — Manuel
By sacrifice I meant the temporary death of Jesus, the 'blood sacrifice'. — Tom Storm
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