From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat Mar 01 2003 - 04:55:48 GMT
Matt S said to Platt:
Are you asserting that all truth, all morals, are
universal, or only some? In any case, you're
effectively arguing against the last 40 years of
thought. If slavery is 'absolutely' immoral, surely
it must have been immoral before mankind came along -
this is absurd: as absurd as gravity existing before
Newton, to paraphrase Pirsig himself.
Matt EE said:
For the last 7 months I have been engaged in an attempt to colligate
together Pirsig with my favorite "post-modern" philosopher Richard Rorty.
I have been arguing that Pirsig does open himself up to some of the
critiques of SOM he uses in ZMM and Lila when he tries to reconstruct a
metaphysics. ... I don't see the introduction of the intellectual level as
dangerous to Pirsig's project. What I see as dangerous is the idea that he
is doing essentialistic metaphysics, that he is attempting to get at what
the World Really Is outside of our attempts to cope with it.
DMB quotes fromTthe Oxford Companion to Philosophy:
"Opposition to metaphysics has come from both within philosophy and outside
it. Logical Positivism, though now defunct, was particularly hostile to what
its adherents saw as the meaningless, because unverifiable, claims of
metaphysics. These objections foundered on the impossibility of providing an
acceptable criterion of verifiability. But the deference to empirical
science displayed by the Logical Positivists is stilll a feature of much
Anglo-American analytic philosophy, creating an intellectual climate
inimical to the pursuit of speculative metaphysics. This hostility is
paralleled in the popular writings of many scientists, who seem to think
that any legitimate issues once embraced by metaphysics now belong
exclusively to the province of empirical science - issues such as the nature
of space and time, and the mind-body problem. Such writers are often
blithely unaware of the uncritical metaphysical assumptions pervading their
works and the philosophical naivety of many of their arguments. But it is
ironic that the deference shown by many philosophers to the latest
scientific theories is not reciprocated by the popularizing scientists, who
do not conceal their contempt for philosophy in general as well as
metaphysic in particular.
More recent hostility to metaphysics comes from the post-modernists and
deconstructionists, who wish to proclaim that philsophy - and certainly
metaphysics - is dead. These writers represent metaphyscics as a temporary
aberration ot the Western intellect, denying the notion that it is a pursuit
of perennial questions for which timeless answers may legitimately be
sought. Of course, these critics of metaphysics, in repudiating any
objective conception of truth in favor of a fashionable cultural relativism,
can make no common cause with the scientific critics, whose quite contrary
assumption is that science provides the royal raod to objective truth and
ultimately to a final "theory of everything". With enemies so divided
amongst themselves, metaphysics may comfort itself with the thought that so
many people can't be right. The ver fact of such widesperad disagreement
over fundamental demonstrates the need for critical and reflective
metaphysical inquiry, pursued not dogmattically, but in the spirit of Kant.
Despite all this hostility, metaphysics and ontology are currently enjoying
a modest revival amongst professional philosophers, who are no longer
embarrassed to discuss such issues as the nature of substance and to advance
realist theories of universals."
That's it. I just wanted to put this anti-metaphysical stance into some kind
of a context. I hope to address some of the issues raised in this thread
later, but wanted to get that on the table. Another thing I learned from my
little enclopedia, was that Wittgenstein wrote his first major work while on
active duty and as a prisoner of war. Do you suppose this had anything to do
with the rise of analytic philosophy? I mean, it seems just as anti-German
as it does anti-metaphysical? One wonders if the split between the
continental philosophers and the anglo-american philosophers was really
motivated by nationalism or patriotism. Just a thought.
Thanks,
DMB
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