What is the difference between mythos and logos

And he does. They are kind of fun to hear. He really believes in that. I laugh. But he said his grandmother whispered it was true anyway, so he believes it. He really does want to know things sometimes. Being facetious is not being a very good father.

The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different.

Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real. So I go on. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.

Has it always existed? It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense. Every educationist emphasizes it. No educationist explains it. So as not to draw attention to myself. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it.

In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world. That, John, is ridiculous. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. Or ghosts either. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on.

Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. This book contains papers delivered at an academic conference in exploring this theme. This two-volume series explores Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from many different perspectives. He shows that both have been essential to theology, with the emphasis shifting back and forth in different times and in different religious communities.

She brings these concepts into the twentieth century, exploring how these two ways of thinking are reflected in fundamentalist movements in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. She argues that these uniquely modern movements are the results of applying the works of mythos to the concerns of logos. The introduction of the book provides an excellent discussion of mythos and logos. The whole introduction nicely illustrates the difficulty of talking about mythical thinking in terms of logical thinking.

He approaches the problem through the philosophy of science, and I found his comments on the scientific method to be particularly thought-provoking: Where do hypotheses that science tests originate? Are there an infinite number of hypotheses to any given problem? Can scientific results ever be conclusive when it is impossible to test an infinite number of hypotheses?

Randy works as a freelance web developer in Dallas, Texas. He spends his free time reading and writing about myth. To this day, I can still remember picking up — entirely by chance — a book in the library, The Muse Learns to Write by Eric Havelock, and feeling it cause a mental earthquake for me. He is more famous for Preface to Plato also a great book , but it was that little volume The Muse Learns to Write which really rocked my world and set me off on a whole new way of thinking about human culture.

It was the book which launched me into reading Ong and McLuhan et al. Another great book that pushes at the idea of literacy and orality as a kind of generalizing principle, a lens through which we can observe all kinds of cultural phenomena in new ways, is The Alphabet versus the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain. He is a wonderful writer and a great speaker… and I had the odd experience of hearing him give a talk at the University of Oklahoma, and realizing that while his ideas and thoughts were of HUGE importance to me, elucidating in all kinds of ways how I think about the world, they really did not strike a chord with other people in the audience.

Which is something very interesting in and of itself: why is it that one kind of message reaches DEEPLY reaches some people in an audience, while that same message just bounces off the minds of others in that audience…?

Still, it was a great talk and that book Alphabet versus the Goddess is a treasure trove of fascinating stuff to think about. I have the Ong at home and hope to read it sooner rather than later. In regards to the por quois story of the turtle, the reference Tolkien makes to Thor in his essay might be relevant which came first, a god with particular features, or a human blacksmith who was so large and thunderous that he loaned the god his features—or did they happen simultaneously?

Is his book primarily historical, describing how this division occurred? Or does he provide some analysis, indicating that this is a bad division and we need to somehow overcome it? So, instead of a separate, individual identity, these people had a constructed identity, one that was inseparable from social context. Laura—the person who first recommended the Ong to me said the same thing, re: Barfield! Have you read Do Kamo by Maurice Leenhardt?

Randy—I addressed this somewhat over at MythSoc, but Barfield does use both techniques. My dissertation mentor turned me on to your site, and it is great to find you and your work. Check out my blog for my own work in searching for a new synthesis between mythos and logos!

Glenn Berger. Certain aspects of the mythos are common to all humans but are unique because of gender, color of skin, sexuality, place of residence, and a million other variables, some tiny, some not so tiny.

Break too far out of the cultural mythos and you become insane or an enemy of the state; perhaps an outcast, if you are lucky. Nice site, insightful. Our daily life is full of myths.

Our knowledge about surrounding reality is more than often insufficient to make logical conclusions or presumptions. Almost nothing has changed from the times of Socrates. People think, that they are rational, but they very seldom torture themselves with logical thinking when they are not forced to. Mythical thinking is more natural for us.

I do my best to be aware, when I base on mythical or logical reasoning. People had to enter the warren of their own minds and fight their personal demons. When Freud and Jung began to chart their scientific search for the soul, they instinctively turned to these ancient myths.

A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time. It was essentially a program of action.

The only way to assess the value and truth of any myth was to act upon it. The myth of the hero, for example, which takes the same form in nearly all cultural traditions, taught people how to unlock their own heroic potential. Later the stories of historical figures such as the Buddha, Jesus, or Muhammad were made to conform to this paradigm so that their followers could imitate them in the same way.

Put into practice, a myth could tell us something profoundly true about our humanity. It showed us how to live more richly and intensely, how to cope with our mortality, and how creatively to endure the suffering that flesh is heir to.

But if we failed to apply it to our situation, a myth would remain abstract and incredible. From a very early date, people reenacted their myths in stylized ceremonies that worked aesthetically upon participants and, like any work of art, introduced them to a deeper dimension of existence.