Charles A. Grimes
``...how do myth systems...change?'' CB
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My general answer is that almost nobody in anthro, soc, psych, philos, linguistics... bio look outside themselves for answers. For example where do ordering systems originate? You ask each of these fields and they give you a different answer. Nobody seems to remember that the natural and physical worlds are highly ordered places long before we came along. It might be a good idea to look at the world, rather than inside the foundations of these fields...
Or something like...
CG
^^^^ CB: Certainly we should look at the world...outside of our "fields" ( minds). That's empiricism. And it is the practice of a myth system "in the world " that changes the myth system.
By the way, I couldn't find your weekend posts on Cassirer, Chuck , or did I misunderstand something. I wouldn't mind doing some group reading and discussion on Cassirer as a followup to Joanna and your mention of him.
What is your definition of "symbol" ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Cassirer Cassirer was both a genuine philosopher and an historian of philosophy. His major work, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 vols., 1923–1929) is considered a benchmark for a philosophy of culture. Man, says Cassirer later in his more popular Essay on Man (1944), is a "symbolic animal". Whereas animals perceive their world by instincts and direct sensory perception, man has created his own universe of symbolic meaning that structures and shapes his perception of reality - and only thus, for instance, can conceive of utopias and therefore progress in the form of shared human culture.
^^^ CB: This system of symbols is the main way in which humans are social, in the Miles Jackson sense. Only by symbols, are we able to have so many connections to dead members of our species.
^^^
In this, Cassirer owes much to Kant's transcendental idealism, which claimed that the actual world cannot be known, but that the human view on reality is shaped by our means of perceiving it. For Cassirer, the human world is created through symbolic forms of thought which are linguistic, scholarly, scientific, and artistic, sharing and extending through communication individual understanding, discovery and expression
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