[MD] Philosophy and Philosophology

[skutvik at online.no]

Matt  

30 July you  wrote:

> It's true, I did use "SOM" in, what we might call, a "de re mode," as
> opposed "de dictum"--I was ascribing to others the enemy of SOM,
> though the moniker is Pirsig's.  It's what everybody does in reaching
> past the idiosyncracies to the commonalities.
 
> I think your comments, Bo, either display a very lonely way of reading
> philosophy ("nobody is exactly like me therefore I am a lone genius")
> or a very short reading list, or both.  Writing conceptual histories
> have been central to a lot of philosophers at least since Hegel.
 
> I think I would agree that James never did write histories on the
> scale of Hegel (at least, I don't think he did), but Dewey certainly
> did.

Thanks for at least admitting that much, but as said there's no scarcity 
of "enemies" of the mind/matter dichotomy. Christ it began with the 
empiricists and came to a head with Kant who cemented the 
dichotomy so solidly that no one dared approach the issue  .. until 
Pirsig. But you (all) use every pretexts  to defuse Pirsig's "bomb" under 
SOM's ark and work overtime to re-build SOM in ever new guises, for 
instance that Quality is the Kantian "Thing in itself" and MOQ the 
"Thing for us". 

Listen. ZAMM (in retrospect) rips the metaphysical rank from SOM by 
postulating a deeper reality of which SOM (now merely the S/O 
distinction) is a fall-out. In the full-fledged MOQ - with intellect the S/O 
aggregate - we see the enormous impact the MOQ will have on 
Western philosophy. With one stroke the trail of paradoxes that SOM 
has left since the Greeks - climaxing with Kant - dissolves. They 
emerged because the S/O was regarded as fundamental - as the 
meta-reality. .

Such a dissolution we have an example of in the early Greek physics 
and its fallacious premises that produced a lot of paradoxes (Xenon's 
Achilles and the Turtle f.ex) With Newton's physics new premises the 
paradoxes weren't exactly solved, they just disappeared without a 
trace. The MOQ has done the same, but to you (all)  the SOM 
paradoxes are so infinite dear, what would academical philosophy do 
without them?

Bodvar