Graham Priest presents a ground-breaking account of the semantics of intentional language--verbs such as "believes," "fears," "seeks," or "imagines." Towards Non-Being proceeds in terms of objects that may be either existent or non-existent, at worlds that may be either possible or impossible. The book will be of central interest to anyone who is concerned with intentionality in the philosophy of mind or philosophy of language, the metaphysics of existence and identity, the philosophy of fiction, the philosophy of mathematics, or (...) cognitive representation in AI. (shrink)

Dialetheism is the view that some contradictions are true. This is a view which runs against orthodoxy in logic and metaphysics since Aristotle, and has implications for many of the core notions of philosophy. Doubt Truth to Be a Liar explores these implications for truth, rationality, negation, and the nature of logic, and develops further the defense of dialetheism first mounted in Priest's In Contradiction, a second edition of which is also available.

Graham Priest presents an original exploration of questions concerning the one and the many. He covers a wide range of issues in metaphysics--unity, identity, grounding, mereology, universals, being, intentionality and nothingness--and draws on Western and Asian philosophy as well as paraconsistent logic to offer a radically new treatment of unity.

This is a philosophical investigation of the nature of the limits of thought. Drawing on recent developments in the field of logic, Graham Priest shows that the description of such limits leads to contradiction, and argues that these contradictions are in fact veridical. Beginning with an analysis of the way in which these limits arise in pre-Kantian philosophy, Priest goes on to illustrate how the nature of these limits was theorised by Kant and Hegel. He offers new interpretations (...) of Berkeley's master argument for idealism and Kant on the antimonies. He explores the paradoxes of self reference, and provides a unified account of the structure of such paradoxes. The book concludes by tracing the theme of the limits of thought in modern philosophy of language, including discussions of the ideas of Wittgenstein and Derrida. (shrink)

Graham Priest presents an exploration of the development of Buddhist metaphysics, which is viewed through the lens of the catuskoti. In its earliest and simplest form this is a logical/metaphysical principle which says that every claim is true, false, both, or neither; but Priest shows how the principle itself evolves as the metaphysics develops.

This revised and considerably expanded 2nd edition brings together a wide range of topics, including modal, tense, conditional, intuitionist, many-valued, paraconsistent, relevant, and fuzzy logics. Part 1, on propositional logic, is the old Introduction, but contains much new material. Part 2 is entirely new, and covers quantification and identity for all the logics in Part 1. The material is unified by the underlying theme of world semantics. All of the topics are explained clearly using devices such as tableau proofs, and (...) their relation to current philosophical issues and debates are discussed. Students with a basic understanding of classical logic will find this book an invaluable introduction to an area that has become of central importance in both logic and philosophy. It will also interest people working in mathematics and computer science who wish to know about the area. (shrink)

Graham Priest presents an expanded edition of his exploration of the nature and limits of thought. Embracing contradiction and challenging traditional logic, he engages with issues across philosophical borders, from the historical to the modern, Eastern to Western, continental to analytic.

This is the first introductory textbook on non-classical propositional logics.

Published in the American Journal of Bioethics.

The paper explains how a paraconsistent logician can appropriate all classical reasoning. This is to take consistency as a default assumption, and hence to work within those models of the theory at hand which are minimally inconsistent. The paper spells out the formal application of this strategy to one paraconsistent logic, first-order LP. (See, Ch. 5 of: G. Priest, In Contradiction, Nijhoff, 1987.) The result is a strong non-monotonic paraconsistent logic agreeing with classical logic in consistent situations. It is (...) shown that the logical closure of a theory under this logic is trivial only if its closure under LP is trivial. (shrink)

The article looks at the structure of impossible worlds, and their deployment in the analysis of some intentional notions. In particular, it is argued that one can, in fact, conceive anything, whether or not it is impossible. Thus a semantics of conceivability requires impossible worlds.

IntroductionCurry’s paradox is well known.See, e.g., Priest , ch. 6. It comes in both set theoretic and semantic versions. Here we will concentrate on the semantic versions. Historically, these have deployed the notion of truth. Those who wish to endorse an unrestricted T-schema have mainly endorsed a logic which rejects the principle of Absorption, \\models A\rightarrow B\). High profile logics of this kind are certain relevant logics; these have semantics which show how and why this principle is not valid. (...) Of more recent times, paradoxes which are clearly in the same family have been appearing; but these concern the notion of validity itself. The standard semantics of relevant logics seem powerless to address these. But they can. This note shows how. The upshot can be seen as a return to the roots of relevant logic, in a sense to become clear.BackgroundThe Usual Curry ParadoxesLet us start with a couple of standard forms of the paradox. I .. (shrink)

The Law of Non-Contradiction - that no contradiction can be true - has been a seemingly unassailable dogma since the work of Aristotle, in Book G of the Metaphysics. It is an assumption challenged from a variety of angles in this collection of original papers. Twenty-three of the world's leading experts investigate the 'law', considering arguments for and against it and discussing methodological issues that arise whenever we question the legitimacy of logical principles. The result is a balanced inquiry into (...) a venerable principle of logic, one that raises questions at the very centre of logic itself. The aim of this volume is to present a comprehensive debate about the Law of Non-Contradiction, from discussions as to how the law is to be understood, to reasons for accepting or re-thinking the law, and to issues that raise challenges to the law, such as the Liar Paradox, and a 'dialetheic' resolution of that paradox. The editors contribute an introduction which surveys the issues and serves to frame the debate, and a useful bibliography offering a guide to further reading. This volume will be of interest to anyone working on philosophical logic, and to anyone who has ever wondered about the status of logical laws and about how one might proceed to mount arguments for or against them. (shrink)

The paper contains a short story which is inconsistent, essentially so, but perfectly intelligible. The existence of such a story is used to establish various views about truth in fiction and impossible worlds.

Logic is often perceived as having little to do with the rest of philosophy, and even less to do with real life. In this lively and accessible introduction, Graham Priest shows how wrong this conception is. He explores the philosophical roots of the subject, explaining how modern formal logic deals with issues ranging from the existence of God and the reality of time to paradoxes of probability and decision theory. Along the way, the basics of formal logic are explained (...) in simple, non-technical terms, showing that logic is a powerful and exciting part of modern philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I start by showing that sorites paradoxes are inclosure paradoxes. That is, they fit the Inclosure Scheme which characterizes the paradoxes of self-reference. Given that sorites and self-referential paradoxes are of the same kind, they should have the same kind of solution. The rest of the paper investigates what a dialetheic solution to sorites paradoxes is like, connections with a dialetheic solution to the self-referential paradoxes, and related issues—especially so called "higher order" vagueness.

Graham Priest; VI*—Contradiction, Belief and Rationality, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 86, Issue 1, 1 June 1986, Pages 99–116, https://doi.or.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is known and celebrated as a renowned phenomenologist and is considered a key figure in the existentialist movement. In this wide-ranging and penetrative study, Stephen Priest engages Merleau-Ponty across the full range of his philosophical thought. He considers Merleau-Ponty's writings on the problems of the body, perception, space, time, subjectivity, freedom, language, other minds, physical objects, art and being. Priest addresses Merleau-Ponty's thought in connection with Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. He uses clear and direct language (...) to explain the thoughts of and the ensuing importance of one of the greatest contemporary thinkers. Philosophy students and scholars alike will find great pleasure in this fascinating exploration of the writings and ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Many people hold that there is a distinctive notion of metaphysical necessity. In this paper I explain why I am skeptical about the view. I examine the sorts of considerations that are adduced for it, and argue that they meet equal and opposite considerations.

‘What is philosophy?’ is a question that every professional philosopher must ask themself sometimes. In a sense, of course, they know: they spend much time doing it. But in another sense, the answer to the question is not at all obvious. In the same way, any person knows by acquaintance what breathing is; but this does not mean that they know the nature of breathing: its mechanism and function. The nature of breathing, in this sense, is now well understood; the (...) nature of philosophy, by contrast, is still very much an open question. One of the reasons this is so is that the nature of philosophy is itself a philosophical question, so uncontentious answers are not to be expected—if philosophers ever ceased disagreeing with one another our profession would be done for. Moreover, it is a hard philosophical question. Many great philosophers, including Plato, Hegel, and others, have suggested answers to it. But their answers would now be given little credence. In the thirty or so years that I have been doing philosophy there have been two views about the nature of philosophy which have had wide acceptance. These are the views of the later Wittgenstein and of Derrida. In the first two parts of this paper I will describe these views and explain why I find them unsatisfactory. I will then go on, in the final part of paper, to outline a view that inspires more confidence in me. (shrink)

Of the various accounts of negation that have been offered by logicians in the history of Western logic, that of negation as cancellation is a very distinctive one, quite different from the explosive accounts of modern "classical" and intuitionist logics, and from the accounts offered in standard relevant and paraconsistent logics. Despite its ancient origin, however, a precise understanding of the notion is still wanting. The first half of this paper offers one. Both conceptually and historically, the account of negation (...) as cancellation is intimately connected with connexivist principles such as ¬( ¬). Despite this, standard connexivist logics incorporate quite different accounts of negation. The second half of the paper shows how the cancellation account of negation of the first part gives rise to a semantics for a simple connexivist logic. (shrink)

We have seen that proofs of soundness of (Boolean) DS, EFQ and of ABS — and hence the legitimation of these inferences — can be achieved only be appealing to the very form of reasoning in question. But this by no means implies that we have to fall back on classical reasoning willy-nilly. Many logical theories can provide the relevant boot-strapping. Decision between them has, therefore, to be made on other grounds. The grounds include the many criteria familiar from the (...) philosophy of science: theoretical integrity (e.g., paucity of ad hoc hypotheses), adequacy to the data (explaining the data of inference —all inferences, not just those chosen from consistent domains!) and so on. This paper has not attempted to address these issues in general. All it demonstrates is that the charge that a dialetheist solution to the semantic paradoxes can be maintained only by making some intelligible notion ineffable cannot be made to stick. The dialetheist has a coherent position, endorsing the T-scheme, but rejecting DS, EFQ (even Boolean DS and EFQ) and ABS. And any argument to the effect that the relevant notions are both ineffable and intelligible begs the question. The case against consistent “solutions” to the semantic paradoxes therefore remains intact. (shrink)

The paper argues for two theses: a) there are certain truths which are analytic; b) these are true by convention. Much of the paper deals with quine's arguments against these claims. The paper starts by accepting quine's network theory of belief and arguing that this presupposes a certain concept of rule following. This may be used to define analyticity. The paper then discusses the conventional nature of rule following and argues that this implies the conventional truth of analytic truths. Quine's (...) arguments against truth by convention are then disarmed. Finally, The paper shows that the account of analyticity given gives rise to a modal logic in the order of s4, Disarming another argument against conventionalism. (shrink)

The point of this paper is to bring together three topics: non-existent objects, mereology, and nothing. There are important inter-connections, which it is my aim to spell out, in the service of an account of the last of these.

In this paper, I will describe a technique for generating a novel kind of semantics for a logic, and explore some of its consequences. It would be natural to call the semantics produced by the technique in question ‘many-valued'; but that name is, of course, already taken. I call them, instead, ‘plurivalent'. In standard logical semantics, formulas take exactly one of a bunch of semantic values. I call such semantics ‘univalent'. In a plurivalent semantics, by contrast, formulas may take one (...) or more such values. The construction I shall describe can be applied to any univalent semantics to produce a corresponding plurivalent one. In the paper I will be concerned with the application of the technique to propositional many-valued logics. Sometimes going plurivalent does not change the consequence relation; sometimes it does. I investigate the possibilities in detail with respect to small family of many-valued logics. (shrink)

There is at present a certain dispute about counterfactuals taking place. What is at issue is whether counterfactuals with necessarily false antecedents are all true. Some hold that such counterfactuals are vacuously true, appearances notwithstanding. Let us call such people vacuists. Others hold that some counterfactuals with necessarily false antecedents are true; some are false: it just depends on their contents. Let us call such people non-vacuists. As a notable representative of the vacuists, I will take Tim Williamson. On the (...) other side, I will take the position defended by Berto, French, Priest, and Ripley. I will argue (unsurprisingly) that the better choice is Non-Vacuism. That, however, is a subsidiary aim of this paper. The main point is to illustrate the method of theory-choice. (shrink)

A crucial question here is what, exactly, the conditional in the naive truth/set comprehension principles is. In 'Logic of Paradox', I outlined two options. One is to take it to be the material conditional of the extensional paraconsistent logic LP. Call this "Strategy 1". LP is a relatively weak logic, however. In particular, the material conditional does not detach. The other strategy is to take it to be some detachable conditional. Call this "Strategy 2". The aim of the present essay (...) is to investigate Stragey 1. It is not to advocate it. The work is simply an extended exploration of the strategy, its strengths, its weaknesses, and the various dierent ways in which it may be implemented. In the first part of the paper I will set up the appropriate background details. In the second, I will look at the strategy as it applies to the semantic paradoxes. In the third I will look at how it applies to the set-theoretic paradoxes. (shrink)

I argue that there is nothing about truth as such that prevents contradictions from being true. I argue this by considering the main standard accounts of truth, and showing that they are quite compatible with the existence of true contradictions. Indeed, in many cases, they are actually friendly to the idea.

The first half of this article is critical: it develops an interpretation of Kant as trying, and failing, to limit our judgments to phenomena and abstain from making claims about noumena, and an interpretation of Wittgenstein as trying, and failing, to develop a theory of meaning that abstains from attempting to say the unsayable. On the reading offered, both Kant and Wittgenstein find themselves saying things that by their own lights cannot be said: in Kant’s case, claims about noumena, and (...) in Wittgenstein’s case, structural claims. While Kant attempts a solution of the problem which also fails, Wittgenstein bites the bullet and leaves his Tractatus, for the most part, void and meaningless. The suggested response is a dialetheic approach—either as an alternative or, potentially, as an amendment to a Kantian or Wittgensteinian theory. According to this approach, certain problems in philosophy arise from true contradictions and thus require a theory that makes sense of contradiction. A subgroup of these problems (among them the noumenal and structural issues in Kant and Wittgenstein) are about things that both are and are not ineffable. The second half of the paper develops a dialetheic account of ineffability and a concise formal theory to ensure that contradiction at the limits of language does not spread to other areas. (shrink)

The paper describes a new way of thinking about conditionals, in terms of information transfer between worlds. This way of looking at things provides an answer to some of the standard problems concerning conditionals, and undercuts the claim that indicative and subjunctive conditionals are distinct.