Greetings, I'm currently reading Bruce Wilshire's *Primal Roots of American Philosophy <http://www.amazon.com/Primal-Roots-American-Philosophy-Phenomenology/dp/0271020261/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1423683794&sr=1-1&keywords=the+primal+roots+of+american+philosophy>- *and finding it amazing. Where has this been all my life?
"Continuing his quest to bring American philosophy back to its roots, Bruce Wilshire connects the work of such thinkers as Thoreau, Emerson, Dewey, and James with Native American beliefs and practices. His search is not for exact parallels, but rather for fundamental affinities between the equally "organismic" thought systems of indigenous peoples and classic American philosophers." If that doesn't harmonize with Pirsig's MoQ, then I'm a rabbit. "Maybe when Phædrus got this metaphysics all put together people would see that the value-centered reality it described wasn't just a wild thesis off into some new direction but was a connecting link to a part of themselves which had always been suppressed by cultural norms and which needed opening up. He hoped so. The experience of William James Sidis had shown that you can't just tell people about Indians and expect them to listen. They already know about Indians. Their cup of tea is full. The cultural immune system will keep them from hearing anything else. Phædrus hoped this Quality metaphysics was something that would get past the immune system and show that American Indian mysticism is not something alien from American culture. It's a deep submerged hidden root of it." Robert M. Pirsig, Lila "Whereas in Aristotle's vision quantity and quality are essential aspects of the ground of being, in the scientist-philosophers from the seventeenth century on they fly apart. When universities were professionalized in the last decades of the last century, they were partitioned and constituted along the lines of dualisms or polar oppositions.' These are eccentric bifurcations in which one side or the other is given precedence as a result of whatever wind of doctrine or individual whim is blowing at the moment: subjective/ objective-which matches qualitative/quantitative-and self/other, individual/group, mind/matter, rational/irrational, present/past, male/female, and so on. Professors live embedded in these mental-institutional structures. No fiddling with managerial arrangements in the university moves them out of this trance." Bruce Wilshire, Primal Roots of American Philosophy 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
