David M
I'll return to you excellent post for me later, but for now a
response to this one of 2 Dec.
> Raymond Tallis in Philsophy Now states:
> "Perhaps the most dramatic and possibly even the most influential
> thought in philosophy is Parmenides' assertion ...(snip)
First, what does ZAMM say about Parmenides? A summary how
SOM emerged starts in Chapter 29 (page 365 in Corgi
Paperback, page 349 in the digital edition) beginning with:
To understand how Phædrus arrives at this requires some
explanation: One must first get over the idea that the time
span between the last caveman and the first Greek
philosophers was short....
Then on the next page approximately Parmenides occurs.
..... Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the
Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from
appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this
separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot
be overstated. It's here that the classic mind, for the first
time, took leave of its romantic origins and said, ``The
Good and the True are not necessarily the same,'' and
goes its separate way. Anaxagoras and Parmenides had
a listener named Socrates who carried their ideas into full
fruition. What is essential to understand at this point is
that until now there was no such thing as mind and
matter, subject and object, form and substance.
Philosophy Now (PN) continued:
> ..... that the universe is an unchanging, undifferentiated unity. He
> arrived at this conclusion by an argument so simple that if you blink,
> you miss it. What-is-not, he says, is not. Since what-is-not does not
> exist, it cannot act either as a womb of that which is coming to be,
> or a tomb for that which has ceased to be. Things cannot therefore come
> into being, nor pass away, for they cannot arise out of or pass into
> what-is-not. Nor can there be space between objects (since empty space
> is what-is-not), and so the differentiation of Being into beings in the
> plural is impossible."
David M.
> Is the concept of DQ a refutation of this?
No, not IMO. According to ZAMM Parmenides is one of the
midwifes of SOM, but in its earliest "objectivity" phase when
"unchanging, undifferentiated unity" was pitted against
"appearance and opinion. This went by way of Socrates' "Truth vs
Opinion" and Plato's "Ideas vs Appearance" to Aristotle's
"Substance/Form" (where ZAMM says our scientific
understanding is born).
But an important thing must be understood, namely that the
"appearance, opinion, form ..etc" was not yet what we mean by
SUBJECTIVITY. Parmenides was the first of the Cosmologists
who stood for the view - how to say it - that reality is real, that
there is a Truth. Against the cosmologists stood the Sophists who
asserted that all was man-made (Man the measure). So with all
respect I believe that ZAMM made an error by appointing the
Sophist the defenders of Quality (Aretê) agains SOM. They were
the first of what was to become idealists or "subjectivists"
And Pirsig sees this
Now Plato's hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and
Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the
Cosmologists against what they consider to be the
decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which
is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal
that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone
possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is
still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato
abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not
because they are low and immoral people...there are
obviously much lower and more immoral people in
Greece he completely ignores. He damns them because
they threaten mankind's first beginning grasp of the idea
of truth. That's what it is all about
So why he chose the Sophists to defend Aretê (All Greeks said
they represented Aretê in those days) against SOM is a mystery
as long as he clearly sees that they were the antagonists of
objectivity - of TRUTH. ie the S end of SOM. This way the MOQ
got its unfortunate subjective slant and the equally unfortunate
"many truth" mission.
Bo
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
