Robert Pirsig
Robert M. Pirsig, American author & philosopher, was born in 1928 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the author of the best-selling classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, acclaimed as the most widely read book of philosophy ever written. He studied chemistry & philosophy (B.A., 1950) and journalism (M. A., 1952) at the University of Minnesota and also attended Benares Hindu University in India, where he studied Oriental philosophy. In his first book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974), Pirsig explored a thesis that Quality is the basis of reality, and that this understanding unifies most East Asian and Western thought. This book immediately received critical acclaim and was eventually followed by Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991), which introduces a value-based metaphysics called the Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ).
The MOQ, Pirsig states, “is simply a new philosophical answer to the question of what is Quality, or worth, or merit, or value, or betterness or any of the other synonyms for good. There are many possible answers but the one the MOQ gives is that you can understand Quality best if you don't subordinate it to anything else but instead subordinate everything else to it."
Pirsig’s two books have been translated into many languages (including Japanese, Russian, Turkish and Catalonian) and continue to be read around the world by millions of people. He is now retired and living quietly with his wife in New England.