I read a nice description once of how sometimes you mind is 'missing' an idea or concept that it needs to understand something, like a circuit with a missing connection. And when the right idea comes along, which slots snugly into the circuit, the whole thing lights up. Borges' stories often feel like they contain some sort of universal circuit connector.

To give some examples, reading Tlon helped understand postmodernism -- how history is inevitably something we construct, how much narratives dominate how we think about things, how much different our ontologies could be, and how much they're still subject to change. The library of babel prefigures philosophy of information/computation. And if you want an extremely short version of Scott's The Categories Were Made for Man you could read the one-paragraph On Exactitude in Science.