Philosophy and Literature

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I decided to post this in Art & Writing instead of PPR, to avoid it being shred apart with debate.

This is a very enlightened discussion between Bryan Magee and Dame Iris Murdoch comparing the written styles of Philosophy and Literature, and the overlap of Philosophy in Literature.

Enjoy - No analysis required

I've see all the interviews from this series a few years ago (3 or 4 years ago). It's a 70s BBC program (most likely BBC2), I watched vhs rips though, This is obviously taken from Betacam SP.

I even remember what I was eating at the time. Coffee & cheddar cheese. That particular combo, for some reason stimulates my brain, (I don't know why!?) and a stimulated brain, is exactly what you need, to watch these.

Philosophy is the science that answers the question that wasn't asked because the answer is provided as the question.


How to tell someone you know nothing about philosophy without saying you know nothing about philosophy.

Philosophy is a strange subject for me. I enjoy it but hate it. I can only process small bites at a time as I go into the single focus mode then like the movie "Up", SQUIRREL!, I'm somewhere else.

Did the Greeks, i.e. Plato and his accolades, give the world reasoning or critical thinking which is the tenet of science or scientific method by their philosophy writings?

West used classical antiquity as an abritary cut off point, as if no intellectuals ever existed before then. They just happened to be concentrated in that time period, and the arts and sciences flourished, or as the Greeks called it "eudaimonia." But history of thought goes back thousands of years before that. Even the Greeks stood on the shoulders of giants. They had the library of Alexander. A repository of ancient knowledge that was sadly lost. And if it wasn't for Mohammedan medieval culture, the moors, etc. What little survives of Greek texts, would have been lost also.

I have a love/hate relationship with it too. Some great thinkers who are not always great writers.



I don't know, but I like Nietzsche's statement that science is also a perspective.

It was a remarkable period in time. It is also sad we do not have the texts from the Ancestral Puebloans and other lost cultures.

Neitszche believed everything was perspective, there were no absolutes. (all Table of values,morality, ethics, being individually crafted human artifices. )And that Humans were unique in the fact they could create their own unique perspectives, not tied to biological constraints, like animals, who's perspectives are almost frozen unchanging, genetically inherited generation after generation, like clones.

As you see, alot of his ideas, go against the grain of 2000 years of Christian thought. That's why he had a book called "the anti-christ." Almost as if he was trolling western society, and all it's established cultural values. He reffered to himself and his work as dynamite laid at the foundations of Western Civilization.

^If your perspective lasts longer than four hours, consult a doctor

You give a nice, short description. I love Beyond Good and Evil. His bitterness is strong, but I can't deny the book is entertaining. I read it on a vacation with my ex-fiancee. That was interesting

Need to make time for Isabella's video tonight.

Also, not to get ahead of myself, but I feel the need to throw the name George Berkeley out there. Just because he's a madman, in the best way.

This really just makes me want to argue . But that's why I enjoyed it, so thank you!

(I love this YouTube channel, by the way.)

There is a series by this professor, which I like. Here's one:

First came Socrates':
I know nothing.

Then we have Nietzsche:
There are no facts, only interpretations

Karl Marx:
Question everything.

Now it's Viagras':
If your perspective lasts longer than four hours, consult a doctor.

Proof mankind is doomed or philosophy is just a grift.

Last edited by txfz1 on 10 Jan 2022, 7:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This is good.

Only 3 minutes in, but I must disagree that literature is 'for fun' and that it 'obscures'. I like the Romantic idea that the imagination is a truth-bearing faculty. Together, Imagination and objective truth produce reality. You see this in Coleridge and Barfield. Barfield believed that the imagination perceives reality in terms of meaning, while reason perceives it in terms of truth. Poetry, in particular, thus has equal status to the more scientific endeavours.