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Philosophy in your worlds

By any chance, by legal philosophies do you mean things like confucianism and the other Chinese government philosophies? Those are actually some of the things I'd like to see more in fantasy. As in, philosophies that permeate an entire way of life rather than just focusing on a singular area of expertise.

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No, by legal philosophies I mean the concepts of natural law, natural rights, and legal positivism. These will need to be manipulated in order to make them fit within the history of my world. Natural law will become less religious and more accepted than positivism among other things. But these are the three concepts that will be in play. It will mostly be a "conflict" between positivism and natural law though.
 

WooHooMan

Auror
After reading this thread, I realize I have no understanding of philosophy, and I'm a very simple individual. :( I feel stuff; I do stuff. That's what I write, too. I might be missing out on a big part of what makes stories have deeper meaning

Characters and their feelings (and what they do with those feelings) give a story meaning. Philosophies are just something that characters can get passionate about.

Don't feel dumb - no one really understands philosophy. Most people only really ever scratch the surface of this field.

By any chance, by legal philosophies do you mean things like confucianism and the other Chinese government philosophies? Those are actually some of the things I'd like to see more in fantasy. As in, philosophies that permeate an entire way of life rather than just focusing on a singular area of expertise.

I'm trying to do that (even using Chinese philosophy as the basis) and in my experience, I think it's safe to say most writers don't do this because it's really difficult.
I do think it's a very good way of giving a fictional culture some grounding. Like a foundation to build off of.
 

Tom

Istar
Honestly I haven't given philosophy much thought in regards to worldbuilding. I'm more psychology-oriented myself.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
While I've not written it into stories in any direct way, there are some interesting avenues (to me!) in my world. Since I posit an alternate Earth that was similar to our own until the late Roman Empire, the arrival of magic into the world had to have created some challenges. Those Neo-Platonists would have had a field day.

Probably the most significant discussion, though, would be regarding other races. Do humans regard elves and dwarves as on a par with themselves? How do dwarves regard humans? I haven't sorted that out, but it has tons of implications for how law gets administered, how war is waged (more specifically, how it is justified), and so on. Philosophy is not merely theoretical.

My only working notion right now is that the arrival of other races (and therefore of other world views) has the effect of ossifying human philosophy. Human philosophical systems that overlap significantly with dwarves or elves or orcs or ogres tend to draw back. There's an effort to figure out what values and beliefs are specifically human. This will hold for most of the Middle Ages, and then there is a Renaissance-like period in which thinking opens out again.

All of it is backdrop, but it's as real as the physical backdrop.
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
My big setting has a magic system that's derived from Taoist or Buddhist philosophy. One of its key tenants is kind of like Yin and Yang: It's specifically a back and forth between Action and Reaction, especially as it relates to who you are as a person. Are you the person you are when you're trying really hard to do what you need to do, or are you the person you are when you're provoked (not necessarily in a bad way) into doing something naturally without focusing or thinking about it?

I call the system Ying Wei. Ying is just a combination of Yin and Yang, and Wei is an eastern philosophy that basically means.... well, it's appropriate.

As a magic system, it mostly comes out as a combat style about predicting your opponent and perfecting your own movements. It's the philosophy people refer to when they do Wuxia-style martial arts maneuvers. You want to discover your opponent's wei, draw it out, and devise a reaction to it, while keeping your own wei concealed from your enemy.

For instance, in the main character's opening scene, he's training with his master. The mentor does a series of strikes that he avoids, but his last move is to grab onto a branch that's part of the dojo - but the master had laced thorns on the branch. He fell with a bloody palm and lost. "Six months ago," the master explains, he had pulled that same series of moves, and remembered that the student had grabbed the branch. "Today," they repeated the series exactly, and the mentor was prepared.

Each of the two sides of the philosophy has a god in the six-god pantheon, the Tigress and the Monkey. The Tigress takes decisive action to shape the world, and her spouse the Monkey god does absolutely nothing, accepting everything, knowing that the Tigress is provoking the world and the other gods into a natural reaction, bringing out his end of the philosophy on their own.

Several of the world's key events, especially the bad ones, could be seen, in part, as the Tigress and the Monkey trying to mess with the other gods into becoming their better truer selves in response. Tigress is the Ying, pushing and shaping, deliberate and willful in her actions, pushing each of the other gods into revealing (and discovering) their true wei.
 
In my current work, there is a city of mages that practice something called the Philosophy of One, or the Path of One. This city doesn't believe in a deity, and instead believe that magic comes from an inner energy that flows through everything (kinda like the Force). They formed a whole philosophical structure around this concept, and teach it as part of a young mage's training. I also have a school of swordsmanship that has a bushido/eastern philosophy aspect to its teachings, blended with the concept that there are certain specific virtues that one must master in order to become a skilled swordsman.
 

Mindfire

Istar
After reading this thread, I realize I have no understanding of philosophy, and I'm a very simple individual. :( I feel stuff; I do stuff. That's what I write, too.
Believe it or not, that itself is a philosophy! You're not as simple as you may think.

I might be missing out on a big part of what makes stories have deeper meaning, but I just never considered philosophy an important part of any of my stories.
If I were you, I wouldn't worry about this too much. You don't have to be an ivory tower type, or have any philosophical knowledge (if there even is such a thing) to have meaning in your writing. Philosophy is, when you strip away all the filigree, just various ways of thinking about what we believe, how we think, and why we approach the world the way we do. But you don't need any formal knowledge to do that. And by seeking the formal knowledge, it's possible to miss the point entirely, grasping at the shadow and losing the substance. Meaning does not come from philosophy, but the reverse. Philosophy is just a way of talking about meaning. So if you really want to put meaning into your stories, all you have to do is to be honest. Be honest with your reader and with yourself about what you think, what you feel, what you believe. That kind of honesty is the marinade that suffuses our stories while they're cooking in our minds. That's where the meaning comes from. Then, later on, some academic type will pick up your book and set upon it with theories and impressive jargon that may or may not represent what you actually meant and make you out to be positively brilliant by their standards, for better or worse, and no one will be the wiser whether you "know philosophy" or not. That's the way of things. :D
 
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