Pirsig

Below is an automatically generated list of the blog posts assigned to the “Pirsig” category. Sometimes the connection with the man himself may be tenuous. Nonetheless, a friend who died of cancer in 2021 wrote me in 2016,

Have you ever thought about organizing your writings under the theme of: Homage to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? I guess that would fall under literary criticism/philosophy/politics/self-help/essay. I’m not sure where exactly I would shelve it. Probably non-fiction essay, not far from Joan Didion and Susan Sontag.

I have written more about R. G. Collingwood than about Robert Pirsig, perhaps in proportion to their published output. The posts in which I say the most concerning Pirsig are these, in reverse chronological order:

2018
“A New Kind of Science” (at least newly recognized, particularly by Collingwood, who called it criteriological; Pirsig shows that rhetoric is an example, despite his use of a text that brings in “elementary stimulus-response theory”).
2016, August
“All You Need Is Love” (in between forcing education on young people, as traditionalists may do, and letting them take it or leave it, as Pirsig suggests, there is seducing them into it)
2016, June
“One & Many” (based almost entirely on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, starting with the idea of the Church of Reason)
2015
“Liberation” (connecting Pirsig, through the quotation, “The real cycle you’re working on is the cycle called ‘yourself’,” to Collingwood and to Masanobu Fukuoka)
2013
“Books Hung Out With” (three of them, one being ZAMM)

All Pirsig Posts

  1. Books hung out with (June 25, 2013)
  2. The Tradition of Western Philosophy (September 10, 2013)
  3. NL II: “The Relation Between Body and Mind” (January 20, 2014)
  4. NL VI: “Language,” again (March 31, 2014)
  5. NL VII: “Appetite” (May 5, 2014)
  6. Freedom (August 4, 2014)
  7. The Istanbul Seaside (December 3, 2014)
  8. Body and Mind (January 20, 2015)
  9. Liberation (February 5, 2015)
  10. Thoreau by the Aegean (August 29, 2015)
  11. What I loath about Facebook (February 16, 2016)
  12. Surgery & Recovery (June 13, 2016)
  13. One & Many (June 20, 2016)
  14. All You Need Is Love (August 2, 2016)
  15. Beykoz, Istanbul (August 16, 2016)
  16. Victor Vasarely (March 26, 2017)
  17. NL XXIII: The Family As a Society (September 15, 2017)
  18. What Philosophy Is (November 21, 2017)
  19. On Knowing Ourselves (March 3, 2018)
  20. A New Kind of Science (July 10, 2018)
  21. NL XLIII: The Second Barbarism: The ‘Albigensian Heresy’ (October 13, 2018)
  22. Anthropology of Mathematics (October 13, 2019)
  23. Computer Recovery (November 2, 2019)
  24. Doing and Suffering (March 2, 2020)
  25. Map of Art (September 1, 2020)
  26. On Plato’s Republic, 5 (September 26, 2021)
  27. Creativity (June 6, 2022)
  28. Dicaeology (November 15, 2023)
  29. Sweetness (March 3, 2024)
  30. Solipsism (May 1, 2024)
  31. Hedonism (May 25, 2024)
  32. Subjective and Objective (January 8, 2025)
  33. Omniscience (September 2, 2025)
  34. Prairie Life (September 3, 2025)
  35. Artificial Language (September 6, 2025)
  36. Gödel and AI (September 9, 2025)
  37. The System (September 16, 2025)
  38. Reading and Talking (November 26, 2025)