David M posted this link to an essay on Pirsig: http://www.onlineoriginals.com/showitem.asp?itemID=287&articleID=37
dmb says: The essay is titled, "Collapse into Silence: Pirsig, Tao, and The Parmenides" by Stephen Gallagher. I was a little bit thrilled by it. I read some of Peter Kingsley's re-examination of Parmenides in his "Reality" a while back. Kingsley basically makes a case that Parmenides was a mystic but has been read otherwise for a couple of dozen centuries. I even tried to hook this up with Pirsig's reading of these ancient figures in some conversations with Sam many moons ago. Gallagher's essay is so much like Kingsley in style and in substance that I would have bet money that Kingsley was the author. Gallagher is some kind of Kingsley impersonator or something. Its a bit spooky. Anyway, Gallagher's essay knocked my socks off. It was a dream come true. It was like somebody did my chores for me - for free and without being asked. Did anybody else have a similar reaction or otherwise read it? I wonder what Matt would make of the appearance/reality distinction as Gallagher has it? It looks to me that Parmenides refuses Plato's dialect trap for the same reason Pirsig does and that both of them are opposed to it for the same mystical reasons. Basically, they're both opposed to Plato's attempt to encapsulate Quality, to convert it into a fixed concept. And the appearance/reality distinction - the Plantonic version rather than the post-Positivist modern version - is born in this same bogus move. In his refusal to accept only dialectical knowledge as knowledge, I see Matt's version of Rorty doing the same thing as Plato. Anyway, I just wanted to encourage MOQers to take a look and say thanks to David M. Thanks, David M. dmb _________________________________________________________________ Mortgage rates as low as 4.625% - Refinance $150,000 loan for $579 a month. Intro*Terms https://www2.nextag.com/goto.jsp?product=100000035&url=%2fst.jsp&tm=y&search=mortgage_text_links_88_h27f6&disc=y&vers=743&s=4056&p=5117 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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
