[MD] Babylonian intellectuals

[David Thomas]

On 7/23/10 4:19 PM, "plattholden at gmail.com" <plattholden at gmail.com> wrote:

> [Platt]
> Here we part company because there's no doubt that reason and the "scientific
> method," based on the subject-object division, dominates the thinking of the
> law, the government, the military, the academy and other social institutions
> in 
> the West. In addition to the S/O assumption (which can be called "externalism)
> there are many ancillary assumptions supporting the edifice of currently
> acceptable thought, including empiricism, experimentalism and evolutionism. To
> challenge any of these, not to mention determinism, materialism, and
> mechanism, 

We don't part company here as far as I can see. The analysis is very similar
to Pirsig's and I in general agree with it. Though it was not Pirsig idea to
throw out all of Western Philosophy just provided a better foundation for it
use.

> makes you a candidate for electroshock therapy.
Somewhat overstated. It helps if you voluntarily commit yourself to a mental
institution then after leaving do other antisocial things like waving a gun
at people.

>Sadly, from the success of
> these assumptions that enabled man to dominate nature, it was just a hop, skip
> and jump to applying the same assumptions to dominate human nature. That
> attempts to do so have for the most part resulted in colossal failures and
> untold suffering has been ignored by many of today's intellectuals. There
> aren't many Dusenberrys in the academy, and none in government bureaucracies.

>From my POV Bo's position from the start has been that the MoQ as presented
in Lila is flawed, is wrong. I do not agree with his proposal to fix it but
he has convinced me that the MoQ has some serious, maybe fatal, problems.

If you look at the positions from people here who in general agree that
Pirsig is saying some important about the only thing you can say they have
in common is that metaphysics is "anything you want it to be"

Dave