Marsha said to dmb: No I don't think I should let you put the onus on me to explain my horror.
dmb says: I don't see how its possible to respond to your objection (or any objection) unless I first understand what it is. Marsha continued: ...The M in MoQ is metaphysics. If you want to proclaim it dead, you need a better justification and explanation than to quote "academic philosophers" or the book from your latest class. Neither RMP or Nietzsche were lazy thinkers. dmb says: Oh, I see. This is enough to see where you're coming from because I was just there myself. There is a sense in which Pirsig's philosophy is a metaphysical system. We can see this in his treatment of the objections to it that are typically raised by positivists and mystics and in his general attitude that doing metaphysics is unavoidable when dealing with any coherent system of thought. This is not the kind of metaphysics that has been pronounced dead. And I have to say that quoting "academic philosophers" on this point is about the best a person can do because the death of metaphysics refers to a particular set of developments within academic philosophy. Nietzsche was one of the central figures in this development and his "death of God" is still widely discussed. The Radical Empiricism of William James, to use my favorite example, was designed to keep out all metaphysical fictions. This would include the eternal truth, the first cause, God, Ham's primary source, Plato's forms , Kant's things-in-themselves, objective reality and a whole host of entities that could not be known in actual experience but were said to be behind experience or the cause of experience or the conditions of experience, etc. The classical pragmatists see these metaphysical fictions as abstract ideas that were mistakenly inflated and given existential status. They're abstracts mistaken for concrete realities, ideas that forgot they were ideas and thought they were real things. I think "reified" is the word for that. Anyway, the death of metaphysics doesn't even give the flu to the MOQ. I think the MOQ fits into this movement quite nicely. _________________________________________________________________ Search that pays you back! Introducing Live Search cashback. http://search.live.com/cashback/?&pkw=form=MIJAAF/publ=HMTGL/crea=srchpaysyouback 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/
