Reading Club:
Nibley on Mantics and Sophists
This is my third reading club. My
first one dealt primarily with some classics of LDS
philosophy. The second one was a reading within Cognitive Science.
This one I'm trying something different. I want to make it more
accessable to non-philosophers. Also, since we're not focused on
someone who was a philosopher, but simply a rather popular LDS
scholar, I wanted to make it more open to the casual readers to
my blog who are LDS. Although of course everyone is welcome. And
I will be touching upon philosophical notions.
What I wanted to do was to take several of Nibley's more
philosophical papers and discuss them. They are from one of
Nibley's lesser known collections called The Ancient State.
The papers we're reading were primarily notes and lectures and
thus were never intended for publication. So one must keep that
in mind. However they are from rather early on in his career
and show him engaging a lot with ancient and Roman thought. As
such I think they can be very illuminating for his later writings
as well as his views on religion.
This page will provide a list of all the posts on Nibley.
If you happen to blog about this at your own blog, I'll put
links to it here as well.
Three Shrines: Mantic, Sophic, and Sophistic
The first post
deals with what I take to be Nibley's fundamental view of the Mantic as
a shared expectation among all groups.
The second post
focuses in on how Nibley isn't presenting a traditional sense of religion.
Further this non-religious religion is not dogmatic or propositional.
Nor is it a kind of imitation.
The third post
asks how far Nibley goes in the Platonic direction. What is the other world and the mysteries? I introduce this problem, although I don't attempt to answer it.
The fourth post
asks what Nibley means by eschatology and how it relates to the expectant stance he sees under the Mantic view.
The fifth post
discusses or at least raises the question of what Nibley means by "other world."
The sixth post
summarizes things a bit, expands the field of discussion and then launches
in with some prepatory criticism.