[MD] "RMP: Ignoramous or fraud?

mail at tuukkavirtaperko.net mail at tuukkavirtaperko.net
Wed Oct 26 05:36:20 PDT 2016


John,

you know, I've always been curious about something Pirsig wrote in ZAMM:

"Some things can be said about Phædrus as an individual:
He was a knower of logic, the classical system-of-the-system which describes
the rules and procedures of systematic thought by which analytic knowledge
may be structured and interrelated. He was so swift at this his Stanford-
Binet IQ, which is essentially a record of skill at analytic manipulation, was
recorded at 170, a figure that occurs in only one person in fifty thousand."

Where in Pirsig's work does this knowledge manifest? One can have a  
higher IQ than that and still never have proven a theorem  
Hilbert-style or with natural deduction. And before one has done  
something like that it's unlikely that they could be considered a  
swift knower of logic.

As a knower of logic, Pirsig could probably tell whether there's a  
mistake in the Heinous Quadrilemma.

In any case, I didn't even know Whitehead made other than analytic  
philosophy. And funny that Dan just mentioned Gödel and now you  
mention this, because Gödel proved Whitehead's and Russell's project -  
Principia Mathematica - to be impossible. Pirsig convinced me of the  
importance of the MOQ but I mightn't have understood undefinability  
without Gödel.

Regards,
Tuk



Lainaus John Carl <ridgecoyote at gmail.com>:

>    It's got to be one or the other.
>
>  Probably not the latter, makes more sense the former.   He himself admited
> that he wasn't much of a scholarly philosophologist.  And who has time to
> be?  Academics in their lairs, maybe.  In this busy age life is too big to
> keep your nose in books all the time.  So "ignoramous" non-perjorativel
> then, but the fact is, he DID at least read some AN Whitehead.  Quotes him
> from reading his book on history of philosophy, in the bowels of the
> troopship.  You'd think he might have followed up on the man's thinking a
> bit?
>
> All these questions I mumble to myself are bound up in my reading the
> introduction to a book by Whitehead, Religion in the Making, starting with
> a quote from said book,
>
>
>
> *There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life;
> and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the
> quality of the quality.  (RM 80)*
> Now, dear fellow MoQers, I don't know about you, but that statement kicks
> me right in the gut.  Quality?   That's OUR term, right?  What's Whitehead
> doing stealing it from us?   In 1926, even.  That takes some chutzpah AND a
> time machine.
>
> The introducer, goes on to say,
>
> " Religion in the Making is a book about value.  The intriguing passage
> quoted above suggest several important aspects of Whitehead's philosophical
> thinking about the reality and metaphysical significance of value (here
> termed 'quality') and reveals one the central objectives of the present
> text.  First, the sentence manifests Whitehead's typical approach to
> intuitive experience, especially the qualitative and emotionally clothed
> dimensions of our immediate contact with reality.     As a corollary to
> this, Whitehead is implicitly asserting (against much of the critical
> tradition in philosophy) that we do in fact,have such immediate contact and
> that it can serve as a starting point, if not a justification, for the
> kinds of claims made by metaphysicians."
>
> That is, Quality cannot be defined, but you KNOW what it is.  And THAT it
> is.  And this can be a starting point for discussion and logical
> analysis.   Pirsig and Whitehead seem to be perfectly harmonious,
> fundamentally,   So was Whitehead an influence on Pirsig's thought?
>
>
> OR, did they take separate trails up the same American mountain of thought
> and reach the same perspective?
>
> Who knows?
>
> Anybody?
>
>
> JC
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