Matt and all: Yes, everybody has a basic temperament and everybody has their core beliefs. But I think you're being far too generous about Platt, who is beyond the pale. But maybe that view reflects my own intractable bias. For as long as I can remember, the idea of absolute truth has always seemed totally bogus, something only religious fanatics believed. My initial interest in philosophy was motivated by the belief that philosophers, at least the ones in more recent centuries, were too careful and too skeptical to ever indulge in that sort of nonsense. I didn't even realize that Descartes used God to climb out of his radical skepticism, etc, etc. That is probably the main reason I was so baffled when I first starting reading your posts. You probably remember trying to convince me that philosophers have made lots of claims about absolute truth. I literally did not believe it. Now I do. Now I see what you've been talking about. But that same old attitude survived these transformations. I still think the idea of absolute truth is totally bogus, something only a religious fanatic could believe. Its just that my idea of "religious fanatic" has expanded to include such philosophers.
But I think proponents of absolute truth are beyond the pale because that is soooooo NOT what Pirsig is saying. To the extent that the concept appears in his work at all, if is usually followed by something like, "whatever that means" or "whatever that is". Its obvious in his attack on Plato's fixed and eternal truth and on scientific objectivity. If the future is anything like the past, the art gallery analogy, the denial of the thing-in-itself or anything like the Hegelian Absolute (whatever that is), the assertion that truth is a species of the Good and the assertion that reality is fundamentally dynamic. In some sense, the main point of his work is to deny that there is any such thing as absolute truth, no? I mean, there is a whole range of reasonable interpretations but some are just beyond the pale. I don't see how its possible to have a "quality conversation" about the MOQ with an absolutist because just don't see how its possible to be a Pirsigian and any kind of absolutist at the same time. It simply doesn't make sense. But the force of temperament is such that Platt could read every book in your library and it wouldn't matter. As I recall, Rorty said that if "relativism" simply means a denial of absolute truth, then yes, he's a relativist. Obviously, I think Pirsig is also a relativist in that sense. But its also true that Lila, among other things, seeks to deny the charge of relativism. The accusation was mouthed by Richard Rigel in the book but he represents actual critics of his first book. There are differences between Pirsig and Rorty but they're not on different planets. I guess I wanna believe our debate is well within the pale. That's my point. dmb ---------------------------------------- _________________________________________________________________ Change the world with e-mail. Join the i’m Initiative from Microsoft. http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Join/Default.aspx?source=EML_WL_ChangeWorld 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/
