[MD] Chance

[Marsha]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "david buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 11:42 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] Chance


>
> Marsha said to dmb:
> No I don't think I should let you put the onus on me to explain my horror.
>
> dmb says:
> I don't see how its possible to respond to your objection (or any 
> objection) unless I first understand what it is.
>
> Marsha continued:
> ...The M in MoQ is metaphysics.  If you want to proclaim it dead, you need 
> a better justification and explanation than to quote "academic 
> philosophers" or the book from your latest class.  Neither RMP or 
> Nietzsche were lazy thinkers.
>
> dmb says:
> Oh, I see. This is enough to see where you're coming from because I was 
> just there myself. There is a sense in which Pirsig's philosophy is a 
> metaphysical system. We can see this in his treatment of the objections to 
> it that are typically raised by positivists and mystics and in his general 
> attitude that doing metaphysics is unavoidable when dealing with any 
> coherent system of thought. This is not the kind of metaphysics that has 
> been pronounced dead. And I have to say that quoting "academic 
> philosophers" on this point is about the best a person can do because the 
> death of metaphysics refers to a particular set of developments within 
> academic philosophy. Nietzsche was one of the central figures in this 
> development and his "death of God" is still widely discussed. The Radical 
> Empiricism of William James, to use my favorite example, was designed to 
> keep out all metaphysical fictions. This would include the eternal truth, 
> the first cause, God, Ham's primary source, Plato's forms, Kant's 
> things-in-themselves, objective reality and a whole host of entities that 
> could not be known in actual experience but were said to be behind 
> experience or the cause of experience or the conditions of experience, 
> etc. The classical pragmatists see these metaphysical fictions as abstract 
> ideas that were mistakenly inflated and given existential status. They're 
> abstracts mistaken for concrete realities, ideas that forgot they were 
> ideas and thought they were real things. I think "reified" is the word for 
> that. Anyway, the death of metaphysics doesn't even give the flu to the 
> MOQ. I think the MOQ fits into this movement quite nicely.


Greetings,

Hmmm.  I'm more inclined to think that theism and "western academic 
philosophy" are dying, and Metaphysics is evolving.  In-deed!

Marsha