[Dave] 1. Pirsig is a highly skilled writer and rhetorician. 2. The primarily value of his work is that it makes field of philosophy accessible to a much broader audience than a majority of "real" academic philosophers. 3. While his writing skills attracts a broader audience, that audience, you and I, is in general less skilled in philosophy than either Pirsig or people who pursue the field as a life's work. 4. Unfortunately he is a much less skilled scholar, philosopher, and metaphysician than he is a writer. Because of this the metaphysics he develops creates as many, or more problems than the system he is trying to replace. More dangerously he attempts to create a naturalistic moral metaphysics, one in which all of reality is a moral order based on a hierarchical system domination and dependence, that when applied by neophytes, such as a majority of the people here including me, leads to conclusions I find morally objectionable or just plain wrong.
[Krimel] Excellent set of posts here, Dave. I have been beating away at most of this for a long time but you have summarized it all very nicely. I also agree strongly with what you said about the relationship of ZMM to Lila. ZMM is almost universally regarded as the better book. I see it in almost every bookstore I wander into and while Lila is there sometimes it is nowhere near as ubiquitous. I would almost recommend the opposite of what Paul Turner suggested. He claimed that since Lila was later than ZMM, whenever there was a conflict Lila should be regarded as taking precedence. I think Lila is full of errors from the making of up of James quotes but the failure to understand the basics of evolution. Here is an example of that which I haven't heard mentioned before. Take Pirsig the social critic. He spends a lot of Lila talking about Victorians and hippie and the radical social transformations of the '60s with very little mention of civil rights and feminism. These were far more profound and radical changes in the American way of doing things than the peace and love anti-war movement of the hippies. It is hard to take serious any analysis of trends in American culture of the 1960's that ignores civil rights and feminism especially in a treatise on morality. I particularly agree that to the extent that Pirsig is trying to lay an intellectual foundation for morality, he fails utterly. He doesn't even address Mill and doesn't talk at all about Kant's ideas about morality other than to call them ugly. He doesn't mention at all any contemporary thinkers in morality. How are we to take this seriously? 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/md/archives.html
