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.
Greetings,
Hmmm. I'm more inclined to think that theism and "western academic
philosophy" are dying, and Metaphysics is evolving. In-deed!
Marsha
p.s. I better add, (and I mean it) you will never be bound by the measly
title of 'academic philosopher'.
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