Fantasy, SF And Philosophy

Fantasy and science fiction are very different genres although some authors write both and there is a Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Poul Anderson excelled at both these genres. A time traveller is mistaken for Odin in an sf story, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth," Odin himself appears in more than one fantasy novel and his human original appears in a historical novel, The Golden Slave. That is remarkably comprehensive, multi-genre, treatment of a single deity.

Fantasies can assume literal gods and a literal hereafter. Poul And Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys is historical fiction with a fantasy element including interventions by gods and indications of a hereafter. The latter implies some entity that continues to exist after the death of a body. Sf, even if written by believers in a hereafter, avoids reference to supernatural beings or realms and accounts for rational species only in terms of their biological evolution.

Meanwhile, I am reading philosophical arguments about these issues. Freud's account of the discontents and frustrations of civilization reminds us of the "protean enemy" in Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History. 

Does men's ability to control their instincts imply their possession of:

"...an immaterial or non-physical power."?

-Mortimer J. Adler, The Difference Of Man And The Difference It Makes (New York, 1968), p. 277.

Why should it? Adler acknowledges that a difference in degree can, beyond a critical point, become a difference in kind and there is no reason to join him in describing such a difference in kind as "superficial." The difference can be qualitative. The abilities of human brains transcend those of animal brains. We experience "free will" because we are conscious of absence of constraint when choosing one item from among several on a menu but this is compatible with the choice itself being either causally determined or random.

Philosophy and Fiction would make a good combined University course.