[MD] Chance

[Marsha]

>>
>> 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
>


p.s.  I better add, (and I mean it) you will never be bound by the measly 
title of 'academic philosopher'.