From: hampday@earthlink.net
Date: Tue Jan 11 2005 - 08:44:01 GMT
Hi Platt --
> Me, a postmodernist? A postmodernist says, "It's a fact there are no
> facts." Such nonsense up with which I will not put.
Not to draw this out ad nauseum, but it appears that we're both guilty of
that up with which neither of us will put!
So you're not a pre-Socratic, not a neo-Platonist, not an idealist, not a
Kantian, not an individualist, not a theist, not an atheist, not an
empiricist, not a post-modernist. I guess that makes you the perfect
Pirsigian! (Oh well, I never liked labels anyway.)
> There are hundreds of great ideas developed prior to the 20th century.
> Idealism doesn't happen to be one of them.
No comment.
> I ask you, "Do you suppose [the cardinals] would cease to be, that they
would
> literally vanish from the face of the earth?"
I would rather suppose that they never would have been. Could they have
been "Cardinals" before man named the species? Would they have been "birds"
before man identified the biological class? To a child who has never seen a
living creature, your cardinal is but a bright, animated object. Yes, all
living organisms possess some level of sensibility; but their qualitative
attributes are defined and "universalized" by the human intellect. In that
sense, I believe there is some truth in Pirsig's assertion that what lacks
Value to man does not exist.
I expect to have more to say on epistemology after reviewing Anthony
McWatts' 263-page PhD thesis which I've just downloaded and am arranging
"suitable compensation" for. (Incidentally, he's complimented me as a
defender of Berkeleyan idealism, so maybe there's proper label for me after
all!) I have yet to see an epistemological theory of particulars (i.e.,
universals) that makes any sense to me, and, from what I've scanned of Ant's
thesis, it isn't going to fill the bill. Given the inorganic, organic, and
intellectual levels assigned to Quality by Mr. Pirsig, one would think that
an epistemology of structural forms would have been the core of his thesis.
Unfortunately, the author's early training in anthropology set him off in an
evolutionary/cultural direction, leaving many basic metaphysical questions
unresolved. Matt Kundert seems to have noticed this, too, and I'm looking
forward to his contributions to this forum.
I'm going to bow out for a while, since we've already been portrayed as "two
right-wing deist-conservatives trying to work out a 'Universal Morality' for
the rest of us." As you said: "Such nonsense up with which I will not put."
Best regards, Platt
Ham
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