Already reported on this forum last night, I know. However, I think that this great American deserves a more complete obituary on these boards.
Robert Anton Wilson, "Occupation: Mind Fucker"
January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007
The great and legendary novelist and philosopher Robert Anton Wilson has finally slipped this mortal coil, as was announced on his official and new blogger site. Pretty much his last official professional act was to start a blog from his deathbed in December 2006. A survivor of childhood polio, he passed after a long illness on Thursday, January 11, 2007 - a week short of a 75th birthday.
His best known work was the Illuminatus! trilogy from the 1970s, a perhaps only partly fictionalized synthesis of every kind of conspiracy theory Wilson and co-author Sheas could mash together. Some of it seemed clearly ridiculous and impossible, some of it probably true. It was high comedy and a grand apocryphal history.
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But Wilson was especially important as a "guerilla ontologist," as he sometimes described himself, or as he listed himself last month in his official Blogger profile, "Occupation: Mind Fucker." He was really good at illuminating the ways in which our primitive mammalian biology tends to limit and actively subvert our best higher, more rational intentions. Thus, he's been very useful to me in sorting the wheat from the chaff in the pronouncements of alpha males both physical and spiritual - politicians and priests alike. His guerilla ontology of being baroquely skeptical of even -- especially — his own epistemological ability is for one thing the most precise counterargument to the surety of Ayn Rand's "objectivism." It's also a pretty sure prescription for basic humility.
much more at:
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/01/12/062113.php
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