Hi Struan, thanks for a quick response, albeit in a different thread.
There's clearly a great danger of getting sidetracked with definitions and
words, and that isn't my aim. You wrote:
> Sam. Yes Pirsig is an Idealist in the older broader definition of
> Idealism that I forwarded.
It seems we've got two senses of idealism in play - the one you describe in
your original definition and refer to above, and the one you touch on later.
I'll come back to the first, but in the meantime you seem happy not to
discuss the second one (the Berkeley/Kant type of idealism), which is a
shame as that was the one I was mainly thinking about, and the one I would
say falls within the mainstream Western philosophical tradition. (Part of my
aim here is to try and tease out the ways in which Pirsig does and does not
fall foul of that tradition - sometimes to the detriment of the tradition)
You wrote:
> Most here will
> immediately retort that Idealism claims mind to be the most basic
> reality and they will not want to look past that simplistic definition,
> so I do not see any future in trying to place Pirsig in the Idealist
> camp.
That is one way of describing the B/K version, as I understand it. If you're
happy to drop the implication/suggestion that Pirsig is an Idealist in that
sense (which is, I think, the way most academics would understand it these
days), so am I.
But let's get back to your original quote:
> the original meaning of Idealism was ('Concise Routledge Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy' - London - 2000 - pg 379):
>'any view for which the physical world is somehow unreal compared with some
more ultimate, not necessarily mental, reality > conceived as the source of
value, for example Platonic forms'.
I don't have that particular reference work to hand, but I'm not too
concerned, I'm happy to run with it as a working definition of what's at
issue. So let me now rephrase the original question, as you're happy to
claim that he IS an idealist on this definition: do you think that Pirsig
claims that "the physical world is somehow unreal"?
Sam
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