So I came across this in my reading this morning, and I thought, "hmmm. This must be what Jackie Kegeley meant by "un-Roycean attitude". It is rather scathing and yet, somehow comforting. It certainly illuminates a great deal about why the philosophical community has completely ignored Pirsig's work. According to Auxier, its because the philosophical community is sociopathic,,,
Here's what I read: conversation overheard at an APA meeting: #1 ... so did the interview go just as well? #2: No. It really didn't go well at all. It was very odd. [puzzled look] #1: How so? #2: Well, for example, they asked me what I would like to teach and I talked about my philosophy of mind course, you know, and one of them cut in and asked me if I would have my students read William James and... #1: William James? The Pragmatist? [said in disbelief] #2: Yes, yes, and so I told them of course not. Can you imagine? #1: Good God. What did they say? #2: They said, "why not?" #1: What did you say? #2: I said I never read anyone who takes philosophy personally [look of great distaste] or confuses philosophy with things that matter in their little lives. #1:Right. If they want to talk about philosophy as if it matters personally they need to get out of the profession or at least go back to school. Yeah -- maybe we [Princeton] could get together with Pittsburgh and Rutgers and offer some regional post-doctoral remedial programs for those kind of people. --taken from Fashionable Nihilism, Bruce Wilshire The fact that they are philosophizing poorly, dogmatically, even sociopathically, is not a fine testament to the quality of their Princeton educations. The content of their personally held ethic is that philosophy should be practiced impersonally. Their objection to James is that he took philosophy to be something practiced impersonally. This is accompanied by the ethical judgment that each professional philosopher must (this is a stringent moral "must") hold the same ethic, and that enforcing the norm is something that requires a plan of action to remediate, should it slip (which obviously it has, if an interview committee could seriously ask about teaching James, who,in spite of the judgment of these sociopaths, is quite possibly the best philosopher America ever produced). The implicit ideal in the anecdote (and I wish it were rare, but it is not) and whether these arrogant young men know it or not (probably the latter; they are just aping what they've seen ) is that we must all uphold this impersonal standard or more accurately, this contradictory facade, because this little lie is what ensures our standing in the universities and it is also what protects our autonomy from the encroachment of allegedly sub-philosophical (i.e. personal) criticisms. Professional philosophy has become a scam and must not be discovered as such, and its current ppractice entails a paradoxical pose, the "lone wolf, profound, inscrutable interpreter of science" which is now so often imitated that the swindlers themselves no longer realize they participate in a great confidence game." Auxier, Time, Will and Purpose pg 322 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
