Greetings:
Even though I resolved not to respond further to Struan, he took another
swipe at my "Pirsig is original" claim in his latest post, calling it "blind
insistence" and declaring there is "freely available evidence to the
contrary."
Struan's idea of evidence or, as he puts it, "scholarly reference," is to
toss out that names of some obscure philosophers, throw in one
sentence quotes from two of them and summarize the belief of another
in fifteen words.
That this is called evidence is risible. If the evidence is so "freely
available," why not cite at least a portion of it in a truly scholarly manner,
giving titles of the works and page numbers where specific quotations
may be found that refute my argument? No such scholarly response is
forthcoming and raises a question about Struan's self-proclaimed
credentials.
As for his metaphysics, it consists of two questions. "What does it
mean to be?" and "Why is there anything rather than nothing." To the
first question, Pirsig's answer is "direct experience." To the second,
"moral requirement." Taking my lead from Struan, I won't back this with
a list of specific references but merely tell him that the evidence is
"freely available" in ZAMM and LILA.
Finally, when Struan says, "Metaphysics is all about questions," he
supports Horse's insight that he "reduces philosophy to linguistic
analysis." By so doing, he can, like other humanities professors, write
books ad infinitum and achieve tenure because in the
deconstructionist school of Derrida and Heidegger, reality is
considered to be a vast social construct where conclusions can never
be reached (except the conclusion that conclusions can't be reached.)
What a joke.
Platt
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:01:41 BST