Very little fresh philosophical content; mostly name dropping. There is some small value in introducing some basic philosophical ideas, but there's quite a lot of garbage here to stumble over along the way. This book provides an insufferable meditation on how brilliant Pirsig considers himself:
- teaching Rhetoric by first convincing students of their need for it,
- driving himself mad by getting hung up on an apparent logical contradiction, rather than stepping back and reexamining his assumptions,
- redefining the word "Quality" to mean a 3rd category, separate but equal to "mind" and "matter,"
- inventing a useless, near-religious belief rather than investigating the real meaning and underlying mechanisms of quality.

Rather than switching tracks when he came to the end of the line in his "quality" investigations, Pirsig bashes his head into the buffer stop, and desires his readers to admire his maverick, intellectually honest attitude.

Systems engineering possesses most of the tools for what he was looking -- balancing the interaction of the objective and subjective to arrive at what Quality means for any given thing. The field has existed since the 1940s at Bell Telephone Laboratories and most recent triumphs to Pirsig's time were the Apollo missions. Pirsig should have realized that quality was more of a question of "how" rather than "why" -- "why" leading to the synonymous question of "What is good?" -- "how" leading him to a field of thinkers perhaps disjoint with the group of academic philosphers.

He may admire the rowdy kids in the back of the class, but it's because he, like they, is guilty of not doing his homework.