I've mentioned before my acquaintance with Randall Auxier, well that book on Whitehead had a glossary by Auxier, so I asked him about the Pirsig/Whitehead connection. This was his take on it...
RA: "When Pirsig was in school, everybody read Whitehead. Zero chance he didn't read Whitehead. Especially at Chicago, which was Whitehead Central. Perhaps now you are beginning to understand why I am not so interested in Pirsig. I work on the real thing. I hope you are reading MY edition of Religion in the Making (Fordham University Press, 1996) . . . It is far superior to the older editions. It has a 90 pp. glossary by me. The glossary teaches you how to read Whitehead." jc: I argued with Randy on this. He seems to get over-confident in his assertions sometimes - the professor disease - you basically are the expert in every discussion, I said Pirsig had a lot on his plate at the time... etc. But Randy shot back... RA: Zero. Chicago wasn't analytical at that time, and McKeon despised analytical philosophy. That day and age at U Chicago was 100% process philosophy, both in the Phil. dept and in every committee, including the Divinity School. The list of process-professors is endless. Zero. jc: But I still believe that there was enough going on at the time to keep Pirsig from reading Whitehead or the right parts of Whitehead. Perhaps he absorbed a bit in a second-hand way, but ... sure he didn't steal the term "metaphysics of quality" from Whitehead? I think Randy is wrong, but I am having a hard time convincing him. It makes me think, if this is what the academic world does to its philosophers, just makes them hard-headed then Pirsig was smart to stay well shut of it all! But I still want to prove them all wrong. I guess that's the part of philosophy that's as degenerate as booze and ladies, the part that really, really wants to prove hard-heads wrong. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
