Philip Pullman in conversation with Andrew Copson at the BHA Conference 2011

[@manthasagittarius1]

What an amazing, underappreciated piece of work that is. I was stunned by it the first time I read it. So many ideas, and so moving. It should be in the standard speculative and philosophical canon for early college students.

[@andreeam.6539]

I mostly disagree with everything this man says in regards to other books BUT I cannot stop listening to him. He is very intelligent and a fantastic speaker and all in all his own work is really admirable. I would recommend listening to his debate with the Archbishop of Canterbury on faith (it's on iTunes podcasts for free). I sometimes wish that all my favourite authors would just love each other....but that's just my childish dreams taking hold...quite naively.

[@zytigon]

Thanks for video, I enjoyed listening to Philip Pullman. I heard about him from the autobiography of Richard Dawkins. At 14:40 Philip Pullman starts talking about the Chronicles of Narnia. A thing I like about "The Lion, Witch & wardrobe" is that at the Stone Table where Aslan is killed there is the idea that looking more deeply into the ancient writings is the salvation of Aslan and the way to freedom for the people of Narnia from the winter & oppression etc. To me this is like how if you look at the history of science - which is the deeper study into ancient things - then you find a different story which shows the fantasies about the supernatural to be false. The fact of evolution by natural selection means there was no need for a creator, no Adam & Eve, no original sin, no need for a redeemer, the religious stories are mostly fiction. The study of astronomy shows that stars will never fall to Earth which shows Matthew 24v29 and Isaiah 13v10 to be mistaken. We live in a heliocentric solar system so the Bible's geocentric ideas are false. etc. I think Aslan can be reinterpreted as the scientific method. People whose thinking is warped by scripture try to suppress, destroy & mutate the findings of science but the evidence keeps Aslan alive. Scientific fact exists whether you believe it or not. Lewis makes the ending of "The last battle" to be similar to' Revelation' and has stars fall into the sea- which is nonsense - as too is the idea that the sun could go out before life on this planet has long disappeared. Lewis makes a judgement day where everyone appears before Aslan but at least there is the more humane variation that those who don't make the cut only become ordinary animals or vanish ( cease to exist like annihilationism ?) In 'The voyage of the Dawn Treader' I find the idea of Edmund falling into the picture of the sailing ship quite interesting. I think this is similar to how people fall into religious stories, they are taken in by them because they don't see the errors. If you stand on a cliff looking out to sea with binoculars then you could maybe lose your bearings / balance and fall over, you become too focuses on a small field of view and lose sight of the wider sense of perspective & anchor points. Looking further back into history shows the Abrahamic religions to be built on fantasy and looking to the present shows the writers of old scripture had no idea what the world would be like in the 21st century.

[@kelman727]

So sacrificing something on a table is the focal point of the story. Gotcha.

[@Annayasha]

Really Interesting what he said about LOTR

[@foedeer]

I absolutely LOVED his dark materials.

[@makaiyosef241]

i dont mean to be so off topic but does someone know of a tool to log back into an Instagram account..? I stupidly lost the login password. I would love any tricks you can offer me

[@azariahjosiah2123]

@Makai Yosef Instablaster =)

[@andrewkawam2603]

11:12 Philip Pullman should read Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' novels, Ursula K. le Guin's 'Earthsea' novels, John Crowley's 'Little, Big' and 'Ka: Dar Oakely in the Ruin of Ymr', Jeff Vandermeer's 'Southern Reach Trilogy' and 'Ambergris' novels, 'The Buried Giant' by Kazuo Ishiguro, 'Lud-in-the-Mist' by Hope Mirlees, 'The Trees' and 'The Girl with Glass Feet' by Ali Shaw', and 'The Book of the New Sun' by Gene Wolfe, all containing a very deep moral, literary, and original density and ambiguity as they tackle huge and complicated themes with delicacy and intimacy (in a way absolutely nothing like 'The Lord of the Rings'), ultimately earning them the respect of much of the literary community.

[@Annayasha]

Thankyou for the recommendations ❤️👍 i was looking for something a long that line, too.

[@ericadler9680]

My main interest in fantasy fiction as a writer and as a reader is the psychological and philosophical content of the stories and I agree with what Pullman says about Tolkien, that there is no moral struggle, no sexuality and no interesting characters (except for Gollum) in The Lord of the Rings. However I don't agree on his views on The Chronicles of Narnia. Although not a Christian myself, I can acknowledge the astounding philosophical depth in the Narnia stories - to which the ending of The Last Battle, the last book in the series, is a logical conclusion - and I can warmly recommend the book "The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy" to anyone interested in philosophical themes in fiction. It's clearly the best book I've read so far in the Popular Culture and Philosophy Series and I will discuss it on my channel in the next few weeks.

[@ukeuwatch]

A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay can be found at gutenberg org ebooks 1329

[@peterman1249]

He was completely wrong about square root of -1 not existing! It exists in the field of complex numbers, but doesn't exist in the field of real numbers. It's similar to saying that the solution "-1" to the equation x+1=0 doesn't exist in the set of positive whole numbers. The fact they are called "Imaginary" numbers is due to mathematicians initially not having an intuitive handle on what they mean - Gauss did away with that using the Argand diagram.

[@bloopblooper490]

Peter Man the computation is of negative number, it never "achieves" / reaches 1. Likewise the computation of number 1 our any derivative thereof never "achieves" or strangely derives the computation of numbers less than 1. I find it funny that any notion of mathematical knowledge struggles with the Mandelbrot series, but hey.... Whatever. That was not offered to invite argument, only consideration.

[@zeppelinhead93]

I'm not the post office I'm a storyteller

[@peterc9153]

Scripture prophesies that a time shall come when good shall be deemed evil and evil shall be deemed good. The honourable base and the base honourable. Sad figures like Philip Pullman and all that they represent fulfill this prophesy. When my own faith was young and fragile I used to feel great anger and feel threatened by the ilk of Pullman. But in the context of a biblical prophesy I have since matured into, I now find these people make my faith impregnable.

[@headlessspaceman5681]

Yeah that's how I felt when I was 14 too. But when you turn 16 you'll grow out of that whole Biblical prophecy thing, when you see Christopher Walken's movie The Prophecy.

[@felixwinter3173]

Kinda disappointed about his views on Tolkien, the father of modern fantasy, who created the most deep secondary world in the history of literature.

[@laurentivoli1183]

Christ is source, light, pure consciousness, data, code; and so really Jesus was embodying christ. It was expressing through him as a channel via his higher self, which can only occur through ultimate enlightenment or as the vedic Kundalini process.

[@headlessspaceman5681]

Christ is Swiss cheese, corned beef, sauerkraut, and thousand island dressing on a grilled rye sandwich. Christ embodies the universal principle of sandwich and by implication mayonnaise and pickles.

[@Aruthizar]

Indeed. theory in practice. even when he's dead

[@manthasagittarius1]

Don't piss on the canon before you do your homework. You can repudiate the great ones, but you have to read them to the bone first to earn the right. If he doesn't know Campbell was a hardcore Jungian, he doesn't know enough to engage the question.

[@Aruthizar]

Lolol at 30:43 serves him right; carl jung was great man.

[@JEKAZOL]

Slates Tolkien and Jung? No soul.