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sprookjes

The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

In most cultures, there is no clear line separating myth from folk or fairy tale. All these together form the literature of preliterate societies. The Nordic languages have only one word for both: saga. The German language retained the word Sage for myths, while fairy stories are called MĂ€rchen. It’s the same in the Dutch language, the word Sage for myths, while fairy tales are called sprookjes. It is unfortunate...
brain conscious mind

Brains in Vats Paradox

Penfield’s classic brain experiments of the 1930s inspired a certain famous riddle, long since dubbed “brains in vats” by philosophy students. It goes like this: You think you’re sitting there reading this post. Actually, you could be a disembodied brain in a laboratory somewhere, soaking in a vat of nutrients. Electrodes are attached to the brain. And a mad scientist feeds it with a stream of electrical impulses that exactly...
Albruna Gudrun Maier files

Soror Mystica

The anima as a friend or soror mystica (mystical sister) has always played a great role in history. In the “cours d’amour” (courts of love) of RenĂ© d’Anjou she even takes precedence over the wife. The term maĂźtresse actually means mistress or master. In the Middle Ages, for example, the worship of the anima led to courtly love, in which the knight was committed to his lady and was at her service. In later history we know of women such […]...
heresy

Heresy and Heretics

Heretic Middle English: from Old French heretique, via ecclesiastical Latin from Greek hairetikos ‘able to choose’ (in ecclesiastical Greek, ‘heretical’), from haireomai ‘choose’. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica one can read:“The word heresy is derived from the Greek hairesis which originally meant an act of choosing, and so came to signify a set of philosophical opinions or the school professing them. As so used the term was neutral, but once appropriated...
Contradictions and paradox

Can truth be a liar?

When it is exclaimed that contradictions may very well be true, numerous analytic philosophers will screw up their face into an appearance of discomfort, and say ‘But I just don’t see what it could be for a contradiction to be true’. They could mean numerous things by this. ‘See’ might just mean ‘understand’, by which case they might be complaining that traditional two-valued semantics leaves no room, as it were,...
Stars

Is this reality?

Otto Maier and his theory about waves, reality and time curves are rooted in the works of the men he looked up to, Leibniz and Descartes. In his “First Meditation” (1641), French philosopher and mathematician RenĂ© Descartes decided he could not be absolutely sure he wasn’t dreaming. Most people would probably disagree with Descartes. You’re not dreaming right now, and you know it because experiences in dreams are different from those in waking life. A dream Saying exactly how they’re […]...
Maier files books