오늘날 산업 현장이나 대학교육에서 융복합이 메가트렌드가 되었으며 신화적 힘을 발휘하고 있다. 융복합 교육에 대한 철학적 담론도 지속적으로 이루어지고 있다. 위 담론에서 논자들은 많은 경우 융합학, 융복합, 학제간 연구를 혼용하는 문제를 안고 있다. 심지어 특정주제에 대한 철학적 성찰을 융복합으로 이해하는 경우도 있다. 융복합 시대에 철학의 역할에 대한 논의에 참여하는 논자들은 철학의 본래적 성격에 근거해 융복합 교육에서 철학이 주역이 될 수 있다고 주장한다. 이 논문은 그와 같은 주장의 근거가 약함을 보여줄 것이다. 전국의 많은 대학에서 철학에 기반을 둔 융복합 교과목을 개발 · 운영 (...) 한고 있다. 이와 관련해 이 논문은 기존에 운영되고 있는 교과목들이 융복합 교과목으로서의 요건을 충족시키는데 많은 한계가 있다는 점을 세 개의 사례분석을 통해 보여줄 것이다. 철학은 융복합 교육의 정당성을 부여하는 역할, 융복합 교육의 주역이 되기 이전에 융복합의 신화에 대한 분석과 계몽을 시도해야 한다. (shrink)

Appearing in English for the first time, Schelling’s 1842 lectures develop the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions.

INTRODUCTION "For the Hindu religion is salvation," Sarvepalli Radha- krishnan once stated quite categorically. Despite differences in detail, he maintained ...

This paper relates the implications of Derrida’s reading to the historical context of the passage into philosophy and metaphysics as explained in classical works like Havelock’s Preface to Plato (1952). The paper shows the specific ways Derrida used to deconstruct Palto’s text and how this connects with the historical context of the text itself, the inception of philosophy and metaphysics as we know it now. The first step Derrida takes is showing the importance of the myth element in (...) the work’s structure. One is his etymological analysis of the word “pharmakon” and its double meaning. The second mechanism is the structural laws of oppositions, such as speech/writing, good/evil, life/death, first/second, and original/copy. The paper concludes that Derrida’s reading of Plato is different from Havelock’s in being a form of “textual contextualizing.” Derrida is putting Phaedrus in the wider project of the passage into philosophy and into the dawn of Western metaphysics, but unlike Havelock, he is concerned with textual mechanisms rather than historical turns. Derrida’s reading indicates that Plato introduced metaphysics and philosophy not merely by making up terms and expounding notions but, more importantly, by a set of textual mechanisms that will live on with Western philosophy and thought. (shrink)

Explores the metaphysical, epistemological, and hermeneutical theories of Schelling’s final system concerning the nature and meaning of religious mythology.

The paper aims to investigate the thesis of the so-called Neue Mythologie within the fragment entitled “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus” [“The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism”]. The latter presents a revolutionary project of social pedagogy linked to the use of the aesthetic character of myth and poetry in the formation of the conscience and the intellect of the people. The program, therefore, formulates a fertile dialogue between the emancipatory potential of the Enlightenment and Jena Romanticism, in that (...) it proposes a re-evaluation of feelings and Sinnlichkeit [sensuousness] in connection to modern rationality and freedom. The links between the rational mythology of the program and Hegelian philosophy will be explored, starting from his early writings, which are strictly concerned with the importance of a popular and sensuous religion (Volksreligion). Secondly, the work will retrace the same sensuous externalization of philosophical ideas within the relationships between art, religion and philosophy in the mature system, addressing the problem of Hegel’s change of heart regarding art and mythology between the two phases of his thought. In the end the value of symbolical mediation of concepts and idea will be established. (shrink)

A comprehensive cross-referenced guide to classical Hinduism from its beginnings to the fifteenth century explains rites, concepts, myths, symbols, literary texts.

In Schelling’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, he outlines an aesthetic theory of the novel and how it communicates truth, based around his Identitätssystem. In doing so, he understands truth as symbolic, where the symbolic is tautegorical. In his later lectures on mythology he instantiates a new understanding of ontology and mythology as tautegorical, and makes gestures towards how to understand aesthetic forms based on these new accounts. This paper explores how that new aesthetic understanding of (...) truth, ontology, and aesthetics can be used to create a new Schellingian theory of the novel. To explore this, the paper looks at the worldview presented in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, arguing that it could be seen as the late Schellingian novel and as such, present a new paradigm for understanding truth as communicated through literature. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Do Christmas Mythologies Even Exist? The Secular Christmas Mythology: The Santa Story A Sacred Christmas Mythology: The Virginal Conception The Problem of Literal Truth The Philosophical Case Against Literal Truth: Russell's Teapot The Religious Case Against Literal Truth: Tillich's Broken Myths.

It is usually said that there is a clear difference between pre-philosophical texts such as Homer’s Iliad and what is provided in the fragments corresponding to first philosophers such as Thales of Miletus. This paper tries to show that this is not undoubtedly so, and it does that by means of the analysis of a fragment of the Iliad in which Hypnos is speaking. In this way, the main argument is that, while the fragment can be interpreted both in a (...) literal and in a metaphorical or poetic sense, in both of those cases it can be thought that it is related to philosophy or rational thinking. If the interpretation is literal, the fragment expresses an idea very akin to an important thesis by Thales of Miletus. On the other hand, if the interpretation is metaphorical or poetic, we have to assume, following several contemporary reasoning theories, that the fragment is essentially based on an evident rational inference. (shrink)

Jamake Highwater is a master storyteller and one of our most visionary writers, hailed as "an eloquent bard, whose words are fire and glory" (Studs Terkel) and "a writer of exceptional vision and power" (Ana"is Nin). Author of more than thirty volumes of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Highwater--considered by many to be the intellectual heir of Joseph Campbell--has long been intrigued by how our mythological legacies have served as a foundation of modern civilization. Now, in The Mythology of Transgression, (...) he uses his remarkable narrative powers to offer a personal and extraordinarily far-ranging examination of how people who stand outside of society--by dint of their sexual orientation, physical appearance, ideas, artistic inclinations, or ethnic heritage--often achieve lasting, even profound influence upon the culture at large. Drawing from a stunningly rich variety of sources ranging from the arts and literature to biology, physics, psychology, and anthropology, Highwater looks at his own outsider status--as a gay man, an artist, and an orphaned Native American--in an attempt to explore how mythologies from ancient times to the present have shaped the ways we think about social "abnormality" and alienation. Throughout, he points to a paradox at the center of Western values--the competing notions that the outsider is at once sinful and wise, that in everyday life the transgressor is ostracized, while in our most durable folklore and religious legends, heroes must break the rules to achieve greatness. Focusing in particular on homosexuality as a modern metaphor of transgression, Highwater brilliantly mixes personal anecdotes with wide ranging research, leading us on a tour through the history of social conformity and rejection, citing examples that span from Judeo-Christian-Islamic doctrines of good and evil, to the Navajo Nation's ambivalence toward the nature of sexuality, to Carson McCullers's treatment of physical deformity in the novella Member of the Wedding, to Descartes's theories of dualism. He also pays special attention to the debates currently raging in science regarding the biology of homosexuality and provides an engaging discussion of why we are motivated to seek a genetic basis of sexual orientation in the first place. Jamake Highwater has long been celebrated as a writer uniquely suited to give voice to the social outsider. Often provocative, always fascinating, The Mythology of Transgression is a tour de force of eloquent scholarship, a book that will prompt discussion and debate on the subject for years to come. (shrink)

_Explores the metaphysical, epistemological, and hermeneutical theories of Schelling’s final system concerning the nature and meaning of religious mythology._.

This study accounts for disparate portrayals of divine destroyer Śiva in the normative Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata as opposed to Kālidāsa’s amatory Kumārasaṃbhava and Raghuvaṃśa by contrasting the primary and secondary Sanskrit epic authors’ respective reliances on the Mānavadharmaśāstra and the Kāmasūtra. By arguing, per Richard Johnson’s postpoststructuralism, that these mythological and philosophical differences deliberately reflect those poets’ specific sociohistorical contexts, this inquiry accounts more accurately for Śiva’s classical-epic depictions than do Stella Kramrisch’s and Wendy Doniger [O’Flaherty]’s investigations informed by Claude (...) Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and Don Handelman and David Shulman’s researches influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s poststructuralism. The present work, in revising such prevailing Indological notions as Romila Thapar’s traditional construal of the “classical,” Donald R. Davis Jr.’s anthropocentric definition of puruṣārtha (human aim), and Sheldon Pollock’s unvarying characterization of śāstras (treatises), models a historically aware approach that appreciates the interrelationship of mythological philosophy and philosophical mythology. (shrink)

It’s a cornerstone of epistemology that knowledge requires truth – that is, that knowledge is factive. Allan Hazlett boldly challenges orthodoxy by arguing thatthe ordinary concept of knowledge is not factive. On this basis Hazlett further argues that epistemologists shouldn’t concern themselves with the ordinary concept of knowledge, or knowledge ascriptions and related linguistic phenomena. I argue that either Hazlett is wrong about the ordinary concept of knowledge, or he’s right in a way that leaves epistemologists to carry on exactly (...) as they have, paying attention to much the same things they always did. (shrink)

In a tribute to the intellectual legacy of Peter Fitzpatrick, this article explores the poiesis of modern law, as a constitutive ambivalence distilled in the affinity between law and literature. Reading with Fitzpatrick, the resolution of the contradictions of this law in myth depends, paradoxically, upon its fundamental irresolution. Reflecting upon the profound significance of his revelation of the mythology of modern law and its scholarly reverberations, I consider the constitutive tensions of this law as exemplified in the relation (...) between praxis and poiesis, the operative function of the former dependent upon the creative unfolding of the latter. The alchemy of autopoiesis, by which law boldly proclaims itself law, is made explicit in the eschatology of its archive and the formation of its sovereign subject in negation. Revealing the literary dimensions of this law, the conceit of autonomy is nonetheless subject to the subversive substitutions of the supplement. Pressing yet further, the autopoiesis of law is found to be enfolded within a generative sympoiesis, constituted by the movement between its apposite dimensions. Ultimately, extending Fitzpatrick’s rendering of the irresolution of modern law as decolonial, I explore the possibilities afforded by a reading of the fundamental mutuality of myths, and the decolonial conviviality of poiesis. (shrink)

On the 24th and 25th of December every year two very different stories are told: one in people’s homes, by the fireplace or Christmas tree, to pyjamaed but excited and sleepless children; the other to people of all ages in the more imposing setting of candlelit churches and cathedrals. I want to ask, in this essay: Does the telling of these two stories have anything in common? What can we learn by comparing them? The first one, the one I call (...) the ‘secular’ mythology, is the story of Father Christmas. The second, ‘sacred’ mythology is the religious reason why Christmas was ever celebrated as Christmas at all. Although the figure of Santa partly originated in an early Christian bishop (and partly in pagan figures), he has these days become rather more secularized—even, for some, a symbol of secular commercialism. I want to compare these two mythologies as they might effect the way in which we think about Christmas today. I think that philosophical reflection along these lines will allow us to draw some interesting conclusions relevant to theology and the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Habermas explained the attraction of German Idealism to twentieth century Jewish philosophers by appealing to the impact of kabbalah on the German Idealists. Schelling was his principal example. In this article, I trace two lines of Jewish reception of Schelling in the nineteenth century. Among German-Jewish thinkers, Schelling was attractive because of his philosophy of mythology, not because of his relation to kabbalah. Among Galician-Jewish thinkers, Schelling was attractive because of what they took to be his non-mythological version (...) of kabbalah. In both cases, Schelling offered a middle road between, on the one hand, traditionalist rejection of modernity and non-Jewish philosophy and, on the other, varieties of antinomianism. (shrink)

_Appearing in English for the first time, Schelling’s 1842 lectures develop the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions._.

Probing the work of key political thinkers from Hobbes to Rawls, this book examines the state as a real, mythological entity. This groundbreaking work explores the contradictions of our views towards, and interactions with the state and will be of interest to scholars of sociology, politics, philosophy and law.

We see the modern State as the most rational form of governing yet devised, and one which properly recognises our inherent individual rights. However, as the histories of colonialism and imprisonment reveal, it is also an intruder into the lives of generally unwilling individuals, constraining rights. This book looks beneath the contradiction to see an entity willingly sustained by all individuals and for which we forgo our responsibility to and for ourselves. We place ourselves in the hands of those interests (...) that promise to deal with our fears and desires the best. Probing the work of political thinkers from Hobbes to Rawls, the book discovers a State that is a real, mythological entity, spreading across social and geographic space and concerned first with satisfying our two passions. Understanding this mythology may allow reason to emerge from its service to fear and desire, so that the modern State could become truly modern. This book will be of interest to scholars in Sociology, Politics, Philosophy, and Law. (shrink)

The concept of interpretation is applicable to any forms of knowledge, including systems of religious knowledge, designing the ideal model of the subject of religious veneration. The author analyzes the epistemological features of theology as a form of spiritual culture, its formation in ancient culture. It is shown that the epistemological basis for overcoming mythological consciousness was the decentralization of thinking, i.e. development of the ability of consciousness in the construction of the image, the picture of the world to correct (...) the position of the subject, to take into account the relativity of the reference system, from the standpoint of which the subject perceives the object and transforms it into an operational system of thinking. Decentration of thinking provided the overcoming of the subjective mental boundaries of the field, giving the thinking nature of universality. Historical stages and moments of this process - the transformation of mythology into forms of folk art, mythopoetic epic, in the form of religious consciousness. In line with such transformations of archaic consciousness, cultural and historical prerequisites of theology emergence were formed. They are represented in mythopoetic art, ancient mythography, early traditions of critical and rationalistic interpretation of the myth, etc. The article shows the formation of allegorical theology, which became possible in the era of individualization of artistic creativity, when the visible was the difference between the motive and the purpose of activity, creative idea and its embodiment, figuratively-poetic and rationally-conceptual ways of reflecting the world, when the image of reality and its personal meaning began to be realized as different States of consciousness. The main function of any theology is the interpretation of abstract models of the subject of religious veneration. (shrink)

This dissertation attempts to identify the presence and role of myth in Parmenides' philosophical poem. It is argued that the myths of the poem are neither extrinsic to, nor entirely in service of, Parmenides' reasoned account. By virtue of the traditional significance which they possess, the myths of the poem determine both the form and content of Parmenides' philosophical presentation, with the result that Parmenides' philosophy should be viewed as an attempt to sustain traditional tales with philosophical argumentation. Primarily (...) two myths are identified as operative in the poem. The first is that of a mortal's chariot-journey on the path of the sun to a region of life, light and understanding. It is in the context of this archaic myth that a number of otherwise puzzling features of the poem are explained, including the detailed imagery of the prelude, the presentation of the search for knowledge as a "path," the goddess' advice on "ways of seeking," and the characterization of the poem's argumentation as "signs along the way." The second myth takes its point of departure from the first. Parmenides' conception of reality is, at its core, a mythological view of the cosmos as a whole, as associated with the vantage-point of the all-seeing sun at the apex of the sky. A dose examination of the "signs" of what is in Fr. 8 reveals that Parmenides' argumentation constitutes a defense of the notion of the cosmos as a single, animate, corporeal, possibly sentient, being. Mortal ignorance is accordingly explained as an error of perspective for Parmenides, i.e., the inability of charioteer-mind to arrive at an insight into the cosmic whole, the enduring unity from which all things come and into which they return. It is suggested that Parmenides does not deny change and plurality at the level of the phenomena; what he does deny is that change and plurality have reality from the perspective of the unity and totality of all things, in so far as that totality is conceived as a single, ever-living being. (shrink)

This study explains how the myths of Greece and Rome were transmitted from antiquity to the Renaissance. Luc Brisson argues that philosophy was ironically responsible for saving myth from historical annihilation. Although philosophy was initially critical of myth because it could not be declared true or false and because it was inferior to argumentation, mythology was progressively reincorporated into philosophy through allegorical exegesis. Brisson shows to what degree allegory was employed among philosophers and how it enabled (...) myth to take on a number of different interpretive systems throughout the centuries: moral, physical, psychological, political, and even metaphysical. How Philosophers Saved Myths also describes how, during the first years of the modern era, allegory followed a more religious path, which was to assume a larger role in Neoplatonism. Ultimately, Brisson explains how this embrace of myth was carried forward by Byzantine thinkers and artists throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance after the triumph of Chistianity, Brisson argues, myths no longer had to agree with just history and philosophy but the dogmas of the Church as well. (shrink)

We aim to understand how different conceptions of the world coexisted, were created and maintained, and to understand the differences between classical and contemporary mythology in the art context. Are we living in post-mythological times? Is there a pattern or a semblance of structure in both classical mythology and contemporary myths such as the cyborg? Can we stretch the definition of mythology so that it encompasses everything that in some way tries to imbue a sense of order (...) in the chaos of human life? (shrink)

This article examines the development of the concept of the value chain from the linear to the virtual conception of the chain, through the evolution of the literature from Michael Porter’s writings of the mid 1990s to the theorists of e-business and e-commerce in the later 1990s I argue that Porter’s account employs white metaphors and that writings on the virtual value chain both extend the white metaphors of Porter’s linear chain, and suggest a pronouncedly metaphysical system of thought — (...) one which has correlates in areas of thought, including Renaissance Neo-Platonism, cybernetics and the discourse of cyberspace. I suggest that this offers a model of the advance of metaphor — of its usure, as described by Derrida in his White Mythology — and that this model can be synthesised with the views of Ricoeur about the evolution of metaphor towards symbolism. When we apply these ideas of Derrida and Ricoeur to the development of the White Metaphor of the linear chain towards a progressive symbolism, we can see a correlation between the complex causality inferred as a feature of the virtual chain and the cosmological affinities of Renaissance notions of causation. (shrink)

This article examines the development of the concept of the value chain from the linear to the virtual conception of the chain, through the evolution of the literature from Michael Porter’s writings of the mid 1990s to the theorists of e-business and e-commerce in the later 1990s I argue that Porter’s account employs white metaphors and that writings on the virtual value chain both extend the white metaphors of Porter’s linear chain, and suggest a pronouncedly metaphysical system of thought — (...) one which has correlates in areas of thought, including Renaissance Neo-Platonism, cybernetics and the discourse of cyberspace. I suggest that this offers a model of the advance of metaphor — of its usure, as described by Derrida in his White Mythology — and that this model can be synthesised with the views of Ricoeur about the evolution of metaphor towards symbolism. When we apply these ideas of Derrida and Ricoeur to the development of the White Metaphor of the linear chain towards a progressive symbolism, we can see a correlation between the complex causality inferred as a feature of the virtual chain and the cosmological affinities of Renaissance notions of causation. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: SATS Jahrgang: 17 Heft: 2 Seiten: 115-144.

Darwin said that our social instincts are so crucial to our lives that they must have been strongly developed during evolution by means of group-selection. These instincts now ground our motives and shape the complexity of our lives. So the idea of deriving all our motivation from the single stem of “selfishness” is radically mistaken.

Darwin said that our social instincts are so crucial to our lives that they must have been strongly developed during evolution by means of group-selection. These instincts now ground our motives and shape the complexity of our lives. So the idea of deriving all our motivation from the single stem of “selfishness” is radically mistaken.

This concise, accessible and engaging collection debunks the myths and corrects the falsehoods surrounding one of the most famous scientific figures in history - Charles Darwin. Leading scholars examine his life and work to set the historical record straight, and to draw conclusions about the very nature of science itself.