[MD] [Bulk] Re: Rorty's Relativism

[david buchanan]

After I posted the evidence twice, Marsha asked:
Where is your evidence that he rejects it?

dmb says:
I suppose you're not really asking WHERE the evidence is because I already told you twice that it could be found at the end of chapter 29. I guess you want me to EXPLAIN the evidence. I'm tempted to insult your reading skills because hunger makes me impatient and I skipped lunch today but I won't.  Instead, I'll ask you to think about a couple of the key sentences in that passage I quoted"
Pirsig said, "The one thing that doesn't fit what he says and what Plato said about the Sophists is their profession of teaching virtue. All accounts indicate this was absolutely central to their teaching, but how are you going to teach virtue if you teach the RELATIVITY of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute."
I think it's obvious that Pirsig is casting doubt on the idea that the Sophists were relativists. That's "what Plato said about the Sophists" and yet virtue "was absolutely central to their teaching". This doesn't make sense to him and so he thinks "something is missing" and "his search for it [the missing part] takes him through a number of histories of ancient Greece". Thanks to "H. D. F. Kitto's The Greeks" he discovers that "virtue" is an english translation of the Greek word "areté", which means "excellence". This is quite a revelation to him and he describes a sort of epiphany that comes out of this discovery. 
"'Lightning hits! Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! NOT ETHICAL RELATIVISM. Not pristine "virtue." But areté. Excellence. Dharma!"
Let me repeat the central part of that.

"That is what the Sophists were teaching. Not ethical relativism."

The meaning of that could be re-stated as, "The Sophists were not teaching relativism. They were teaching Quality."

If you still don't see it, I don't think I can help.





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