dmb asked: Can a psychopath be a good philosopher?
David Thomas replied(Sarcasm snipped): As you can see from this little snippet would have been an arduous task to apply this theory to all of ZaMM and Lila. Probably it would be easier to take the fully texts and mark the appropriate passages with the nine traits. I suspect it would be cacophony of numbers. dmb says: There certainly was some grandiosity about Phaedrus' mission but other than that I don't see any similarities. And his grandiose mission turned out to be true, more or less. No, a psychotic break is not at all like psychopathy. Psychopaths are not insane. And yes, the narrator of ZAMM is a social level "sell-out" and a cold father but this fictional character is not a psychopath. Even normal people can have one or two of these traits but psychopathy is essentially a lack of empathy. And there is a whole range of disorders on a continuum from mild narcissism to stone cold serial killers. It's a disturbingly common affliction. And yes, I meant Marsha. I'd been reading some articles about this personality disorder (for another discussion group) and was struck by the similarities between Marsha and their descriptions. I was especially struck by the author's description of the "epistemic virtues and values that promote the pursuit of knowledge". Like Pirsig, I think, he doesn't insist on any essential feature but promotes a whole batch of epistemic virtues and values. The article's list looks very much like Pirsig's list, don't you think? "Among these are being clear, valuing evidence, exposing theories to testing, not being dogmatic, keeping explanations and explanatory entities as simple as possible, and not letting politics determine good scholarship". Now, in his analogy, postmodernist lack these epistemic virtues and values. And they don’t want them. "In fact, in analogy with the narcissism of psychopaths, postmodernists view themselves as superior to those who possess epistemic virtues and values. They see themselves as above such things, as superior. “You don’t really think that people believe because of arguments, do you?” is a common question put by postmodernists, usually with an arrogant and condescending tone." [Ron] I think we must be careful when we start to draw paralels between psychopathy and post modernism because depending on the point of view and the complicated overlaping of ideas that constitutes the label of "postmodernist" certain philosophers can be grouped in with the movement (Foucault, Quine, Rorty,Wittgenstein) that otherwise would be excluded depending on the point of view, In fact, the project of Pragmatism is often contsrued as a postmodernist project (albeit usually by objectivist criteria). I find it interesting how this fits together with Paul Turners efforts because it seems to me he, like Heidegger, asks us to re-examine the ancient Greek notion of aporia as being informative by such destabilizing notions and not merely used for out and out decontruction as a rule or an end (which I believe most interpreters of Buddhism maintain). This is where I believe the important distinction is made between "postmodern values" and Pragmatism is the use of destabelizing notions as informative of epistemic virtue, (which is what I understand Paul to be pointing out). Chomsky has argued that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. He asks why postmodernist intellectuals do not respond like people in other fields when asked, "what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious" (how are their views better) if these requests can not be met, Chomsky as Stamos and Hume suggest that the discussion is fruitless and the rhetorical project doomed. In conclusion I think what some of us here are up against is a kind of viscous skepticism that has not only become a fashionable political stance but a real cultural problem that Pirsig identifies as cultural paralysis. It is also a problem for the school of thought known as Pragmatism (and I lump Buddhism in with it) in that this sort of viscous skepticism manifests itself within these schools of thought and is taken as a legitimized form and often representational of the project aim which de-rails alot of potentially informative dialog in that the dialog mostly consists of this conflict in values. "Intellect must know which side it's on and never undercut it." Likewise, this forum must know which side it's on and when faced with ideas that destabilize it's core value base, be able to identify them. By indentify I do not mean to label but to recognize when dialog is useless and to move on. .. 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
