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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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Philip Kitcher
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 20
Philosopher
University Teacher
London
England
Philip Stuart Kitcher
Take
Religions
Allegories
Make
Interpretation
Emancipate
Metaphor
Doctrinal
Arguing
Allegory
Statements
Metaphors
Doctrine
Doctrines
Progress
Literal
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Literalism

More quotes by Philip Kitcher

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Britten's opera tends to see things in simpler terms. It portrays an Aschenbach who wants a richer form of sexual fulfillment, and who is hemmed in by the social conventions to which he subscribes. But Visconti's use of the Mahler Adagietto is perfect for what I take to be Aschenbach's sexual desire.
Philip Kitcher
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If there are to be appropriate judgments about what questions are significant, you need both the informed views of scientists who know what has been achieved and what future developments are promising and the reflective judgments of representatives of different groups who can identify what kinds of information are most urgently needed.
Philip Kitcher
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It's a very bad idea for scientific conclusions to be accepted because they fit with the political values of a group of researchers.
Philip Kitcher
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Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives.
Philip Kitcher
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I take the ethical truths to be the stable elements that emerge out of ethical progress and that are retained under further ethical progress.
Philip Kitcher
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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 this work of Nietzsche's played much role in the gestation of the novella.
Philip Kitcher
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I'm very suspicious of the idea of a final theory in natural science, and the thought of a complete system of ethical rules seems even more dubious.
Philip Kitcher
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There are many critics whose work I greatly admire. Even though I diverge from T.J. Reed in several important ways, I've learned greatly from his writings on Mann.
Philip Kitcher
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Sometimes, however, the new synthetic complex proves stable, and even serves as the beginning of a much larger cluster of attitudes that displace some we've previously considered to be fixed parts of ourselves.
Philip Kitcher
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The amalgam of psychological attitudes we form is the synthetic complex. It may fall apart quite quickly as further reflection or further experience bears on it, and we may revert to our former judgments, feelings and tendencies.
Philip Kitcher
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I rather stumbled into philosophy. When I began my undergraduate career at Cambridge, I studied mathematics.
Philip Kitcher
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Using the Adagietto of Mahler's Fifth is one of the touches of pure genius in Visconti's film (even though Mahlerians complain very loudly that the piece has been ruined), since it corresponds perfectly to Aschenbach's yearnings and to his circling walks around Venice.
Philip Kitcher
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Klaus Mann saw very clearly how different was his own (more liberated) form of homosexuality from the same-sex attractions of his father - and that is reiterated in TM's diary queries about how two men can sleep together.
Philip Kitcher
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Sometimes, of course, the artist does give up, saying, in effect, I've done enough. Prospero declares that the revels are ended, and breaks his staff - his author retires to Stratford. At the very end, Mann did something similar. Interestingly, in both instances, death came quite quickly after that.
Philip Kitcher
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A different vision of ethics is that of a collection of resources people can use to act better. The resources might be firm rules that could always be relied on. Or they might be ideals that could often be followed without thinking but that sometimes conflicted with one another.
Philip Kitcher
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Think about Mann's own daily routine (ascribed to Aschenbach), read the extant diaries and the letters in which he discusses the novella's themes, and it won't be so obvious that the attraction to Tadzio is completely unprecedented it also won't be obvious that what Aschenbach wants is full sexual contact.
Philip Kitcher
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Those citizens are distracted by the toys technology has supplied, and fail to recognize the ways in which what they most deeply want is made vulnerable by the coming disruptions of human relations on an over-heated planet.
Philip Kitcher
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I don't think readers of Mann have overlooked the fact that he was a great ironist, but they have tended to see the irony in particular parts of the novella, and to miss it in others.
Philip Kitcher
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Any writer who could handle all these different voices would deserve high praise, but to do so without any sense of jarring or incoherence is an extraordinary accomplishment.
Philip Kitcher
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The hardest problem of all is to appreciate the facts that the poor nations are - quite reasonably - not going to forgo their development, and that they can only afford to develop by consuming fossil fuels.
Philip Kitcher