[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
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org/md/archives.html
>
More information about the Moq_Discuss
mailing list