Allegory Quote by Philip Kitcher

“I argue against literal interpretation of religious doctrines. Religions make progress when they emancipate themselves from literalism, and take their doctrinal statements to be metaphors or allegories.”

Philip Kitcher

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Allegory Arguing Doctrine Interpretation Literal Metaphor Progress Religion Religious Statements

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I'm a fan of Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, Lionel Trilling and Frank Kermode. All these people have taught me how to read - but…

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Refined religion is aimed at realizing ethical values, including the fostering of human lives and human communities.

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Many of the greatest works of philosophy seem to me to be valuable not because of their arguments, but because they offer us perspectives…

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As I read Mann in German for the first time, the full achievement - both literary and philosophical - of Death in Venice struck…

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Look at Mann's reading habits, his explicit comments on Nietzsche, and his copy of Birth of Tragedy, and it starts to seem doubtful that…

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My ethical naturalism sees us as facing the predicament of being social animals without evolved adaptations that make social life easy. The fundamental problem…

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So my methodological approach is to draw on many different features in highlighting different facets of the novella (and the opera and the film).

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In my view, we ought to replace the notion of analytic philosophy by that of synthetic philosophy.

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Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives.

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The balance between literature and philosophy in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is different from that struck in the novella, but, as Mann clearly pointed out…

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I don't think that anything of any consequence is known a priori: all our knowledge is built up by modifying the lore passed on…

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Because the problems are objective features of the human situation - social animals without the capacities for making social life come easily - ethics…

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Explore all 117 Philip Kitcher quotes

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I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.

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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.

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A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory.

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“However, as a guarantee of its renewed youth, the symbolical phoenix never reappeared before the eyes of the world without having consumed solemnly the…

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