Matt said to Ron: I'd like to just comment on the notion that Pirsig places truth-finding in pre-intellectual experience. I described it as conventional because I think it is what lays behind many of Platt's rants about pre-intellectual experience, but many others, too, mainly dealing with the notion of radical empiricism needing to act as foundation to pragmatism or else it'll spin off into relativism. I don't like this notion, I think it is antithetical to both pragmatism and Pirsig,.. ...Pirsig does, indeed, locate "certainty" pre-intellectually. This is the same move Descartes made to inaugurate modern philosophy, part of the move I called earlier the shift from talking about reality to talking about experience.
dmb says: Pardon me for butting in, gents. I just finished the semester and couldn't resist jumping right back in. I'm not eager to align myself with Platt and his "rants" are unknown to me but its safe to say I'm one of the "many others" who think radical empiricism is crucial. Matt and I have been debating that issue for centuries. We used to argue about Rorty in Latin, that's how long its been. Anyway, I have at least one fresh new way to say it. Well, its new to me and fresh in terms of what's been said in our debate. "Phenomenological realism" is a label for the same stance. It describes radical empiricism without the Cartesian implications. I'm not sure if Heidegger coined it or if it was just his commentators, but I picked up studying the crazy old Nazi. Dewey essentially says the same thing, except without all the jargon and fascism. Anyway, phenomenological realism simply says that we have to try to start with the phenomena, with whatever is given in experience. But, as you know, Heidegger specifically rejected the Cartesian version of phenomenology he inherited from Husserl and then spent the rest of his career rejecting further and in all sorts of ways. Phenomenological realism is a decidedly un-SOM empiricism, if you will. When I think about quality in terms of phenomena many points connect. There's almost an audible clicking noise leaking out my ears. Try it. Its fun. _________________________________________________________________ Stay in touch when you're away with Windows Live Messenger. http://www.windowslive.com/messenger/overview.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_Refresh_messenger_052008 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/
