From: Steve & Oxsana Marquis (marquis@nccn.net)
Date: Sun Apr 03 2005 - 17:22:39 BST
Matt writes:
_______________________
The "natural kind" of philosophy pans out, as far as I can see (and as I
mentioned before), to the "problems of philosophy," whatever those may be.
By saying that the "problems of philosophy" are naturally conspicuous to all
you can supposedly teach, e.g., "the problem of free will" without teaching
Aristotle, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, blah, blah, etc., etc.
Except you can't. Because even if you drop their names and their idioms,
you're still inadvertently teaching them because without them we wouldn't
even know what counted as a "problem of free will," let alone an answer.
See, it doesn't matter really what I say about the distinction, how its
held, what it amounts to, because I don't want the distinction. All me
defining it will do is empty out my experience of dealing with people who do
hold the distinction.
_______________________
For me the distinction is obvious. Doing philosophy amounts to being able
to put together your own argument, doing philsophology amounts to reciting
other people's arguments. It doesn't matter that the problem addressed by
the argument is a perennial problem addressed by many published intelligent
others, or that your argument is based on your accumulated experience which
includes reading all those other guys. Philosophy is a creative endeavor of
a higher order than 'mere' scholarship. It is the same as original
composition compared with plagiarism.
MOQ has been depicted as warmed over Zen combine with some pragmatism, etc.
All that doesn't matter. What matters is Pirsig thinking it out and
experiencing it on his own, even if the end concepts are similar in some
respects to other Wisdom Traditions. It is this internal struggle that
generates Quality.
Live Well,
Steve
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