Philosophy
Philosophical concepts abound in these works. On one level this is a story of the journey that the protagonist takes through the galaxy and his many adventures on the way. However, there is a much, much deeper level at play. The whole work essentially asks the question 'what is a Human being?' and Danlo's journey is an exploration of how that question might be answered. Part of this exploration revolves around the question of 'what is the difference between a Man and a god or even God?' As the story unfolds the story also explores concepts such as meaning and purpose in life and evaluates questions of morality and religion.
Read more about this topic: A Requiem For Homo Sapiens
Famous quotes containing the word philosophy:
“How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong women the man, many years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)