Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Driving Reality

A pint in a cosy pub sounds like a mighty fine idea!

Spencer, I'm no Luddite (with all due respect to Luddite), but I love your account of the relationship between the creator and the consumer, and the gradual attenuation of that especially now in the AI era. I think it was C.S. Lewis who said that "we read so that we are not alone", that an essential part of engaging with art (literature, craftsmanship, etc.) is the relationship with the artist, the other human. I can't fathom ever enjoying something I know to be an AI generated novel, no matter how good it would be considered to have been had it been produced by a human author. And I couldn't agree more than that a huge part of the pleasure of a Morgan is the knowledge that some skilled and thoughtful humans down on Pickersleigh Road have carefully formed that wood and fitted that hood on (as I picture it) some sunny afternoon before knocking off for tea, fully expecting that some future human will somehow find an eccentric and dubious joy in the weirdly perfect imperfection of this artefact.

(Nerdy aside: you reference the forms and conclude that Socrates would have driven a Morgan: I'm happy to whimsically grant that a Morgan approaches the Platonic form of a car, but a classicist I know tells me that Socrates the historical figure didn't necessarily shared the views attributed to him by Plato in the dialogues. I'd like to think that Thoreau, if he was forced to drive a sports car, would pick a Morgan. I can certainly imagine that Michael Oakeshott would!)

Love this, Adam! Exactly why I thought the 'Pub' would be a good place for this chat! Agree completely re Thoreau. Now you mention it, how fun would it be to assign cars to a whole list of philosophers! Okay, perhaps not everyone's view of a good time, but I'd be there all evening! As for the Socrates/Plato distinction, I'd happily concede the Cave is all Plato, but he's clearly casting his teacher as the voice in the wilderness. As for the Platonic form of a car... would you put a Morgan there? I don't know if I would... For whatever reason, I find imagining a platonic form of a car harder than the form of a truck. A defender (pre the new model) would surely rank highly in the pure platonic form category for its kind. So I'd probably want to put Plato in one of those. Aristotle's up next.

Socrates - Morgan? (up for debate)
Plato - Defender
Aristotle -


Thoreau - Morgan

With his logical head on I'd reckon Aristotle for a Porsche man! 🙂

K

Ok, this risks degenerating into a nerdfest of titanic proportions, but how about:

Rationalists (Spinoza, Leibniz): Porsche, BMW, basically anything German except a bubble car

Empiricists (Locke, Hume): Morgan, other brits and italians from back in the day

Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, somewhere in the middle ground): Volvo P1800, Citroen DS

Now I'm going to adjust my glasses and head back to the library to finish my homework :-).