Includes bibliographical references and index.

I. Theoretical Considerations -- Shlomo Biderman & Ben-Ami Scharfstein, "Is it All Our Fancy?" -- Stanley Rosen, 'The Whole Story.' -- Eliot Deutsch, 'Truth and Mythology.' -- Lenn E. Goodman, 'Mythic Discourse.' -- Ben-Ami Scharfstein, 'How to Justify the Reductive Explanation of Myths.' -- Lawrence J. Hatab, 'Evolution and Creation: A Heideggerian Response.' -- Charles Crittenden, 'Myths, Stories and Existence: Spirituality Without Belief.' -- Peter J. McCormick, 'Fictions of Modernity: On the Views of Charles Taylor and Stephen Toulmin.' -- II: Historical dimensions -- Laurie L. Patton, 'Beyond the Myth of Origins: Narrative Philosophizing in Vedic Commentary.' -- Francisca Cho Bantly, 'Myth and Cosmology in the Book of Poetry .' -- Joseph Agassi, 'Halakhah and Aggadah.' -- John Addison Dally, 'Once More, with Feeling: Sex, Death and New Birth in the Gospel of John.' -- Donald S. Lopez, Jr., 'The Institution of Fiction in Mahāyāna Buddhism.'.

Myths and Fictions - the third in a series of books on comparative philosophy and religion - is a collection of original essays, none previously published, on the theory and the actuality of myths and fictions in the different cultures of the world. Through all the essays there runs the question of the relation of literal truth to truth conceived in other ways or dimensions. Taken as a whole, the book makes a serious attempt to get beyond the confines of any single culture and enter into the mythical imagination of the ancient Hindus, Chinese, Hebrews and Christians, and by this act of imagination to escape (in Italo Calvino's words) "the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language..".

Description based on print version record.