{ "item_title" : "Religious Fictionalism in the Middle Ages", "item_author" : [" Gábor Borbély "], "item_description" : "This book examines a recurrent balancing problem rather than a body of doctrines: how is it possible to aim at truth while, at the same time, firing lies? More specifically, under what conditions can fictitious narratives about divine beings be considered beneficial or even necessary for the proper functioning of society? For ancient and medieval intellectuals it was hardly deniable that religion contains narratives that are, at least prima facie, fictions: what divided them was how to respond to that appearance. The book takes as its point of departure the Parisian condemnation of 1277, which censured the proposition that there are fables and errors in the Christian religion just as there are in others. The inquiry stretches back to the Sisyphus fragment and the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, as well as the Roman historians, and follows the problem through Augustine, Macrobius, Isidore of Seville, and Averroës to the thirteenth-century debates involving Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, and Siger of Brabant. The author argues that responses to religious fictionalism can be distinguished, first, by the way in which different authors distribute truth and utility across audiences, practices, and contexts, and, second, by whether they regard the balancing of conflicting requirements as the solution itself or seek to eliminate the problem instead. In the context of this book, assigning fixed labels such as atheist, theist and the like is relegated to the background. The focus is instead on the ways in which religious narratives and ritual practices constitute relevant parts of different forms of life. In this sense, this book is not exclusively about the ancient and medieval tradition it discusses, as the significance of the topic extends beyond the immediate context of the history of philosophical thought. ", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/3/03/242/480/3032424801_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "129.99", "online_price" : "129.99", "our_price" : "129.99", "club_price" : "129.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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