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.

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.

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)

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)

In Contradiction advocates and defends the view that there are true contradictions (dialetheism), a view that flies in the face of orthodoxy in Western philosophy since Aristotle. The book has been at the center of the controversies surrounding dialetheism ever since its first publication in1987. This second edition of the book substantially expands upon the original in various ways, and also contains the author's reflections on developments over the last two decades. Further aspects of dialetheism are discussed in the companion (...) volume, Doubt Truth to be a Liar, also published byOxford University Press in 2006. (shrink)

This paper articulates Sylvan's theory of mathematical objects as non-existent, by improving (arguably) his treatment of the Characterisation Postulate. It then defends the theory against a number of natural objections, including one according to which the account is just platonism in disguise.

In this paper I will review the developments in the foundations of mathematics in the last 150 years in such a way as to show that they have delivered something of a rather different kind: mathematical pluralism.

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)

Emptiness in India has a subtly different flavor from emptiness in China, inflected as the latter had been with a metaphysical framework inherited from the Daoist and Confucian traditions. The Huayan tradition universalizes the idea of interdependence. According to philosophers in this tradition, it is not merely that everything depends upon some other things, but that everything depends upon all other things, and that each phenomenon interpenetrates every other phenomenon. The Net of Indra is a dominant metaphor of Huayan Buddhism, (...) but its exact content is somewhat obscure. Drawing on a graph-theoretic representation of the key notion of emptiness, this chapter delivers a precise account of the metaphor, showing how it does justice to core Huayan views. It demonstrates the utility of contemporary logical-mathematical tools for making precise classical Buddhist doctrines, and for defusing suspicions of mystical incoherence. (shrink)

The paper establishes the general structure of the inconsistent models of arithmetic of [7]. It is shown that such models are constituted by a sequence of nuclei. The nuclei fall into three segments: the first contains improper nuclei: the second contains proper nuclei with linear chromosomes: the third contains proper nuclei with cyclical chromosomes. The nuclei have periods which are inherited up the ordering. It is also shown that the improper nuclei can have the order type of any ordinal, of (...) the rationals, or of any other order type that can be embedded in the rationals in a certain way. (shrink)

Discusses the philosophical question concerning the exact relationship between the body and the mind and provides analysis of conflicting theories.

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)

Boring Formless Nonsense intervenes in an aesthetics of failure that has largely been delimited by the visual arts and its avant-garde legacies. It focuses on contemporary experimental composition in which failure rubs elbows with the categories of chance, noise, and obscurity. In these works we hear failure anew. We hear boredom, formlessness, and nonsense in a way that gives new purchase to aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical questions that falter in their negative capability. Reshaping current debates on failure as an aesthetic (...) category, eldritch Priest shows failure to be a duplicitous concept that traffics in paradox and sustains the conditions for magical thinking and hyperstition. Framing recent experimental composition as a deviant kind of sound art, Priest explores how the affective and formal elements of post-Cagean music couples with contemporary culture's themes of depression, distraction, and disinformation to create an esoteric reality composed of counterfactuals and pseudonymous beings. Ambitious in content and experimental in its approach, Boring Formless Nonsense will challenge and fracture your views on failure, creativity, and experimental music. (shrink)

The Empiricists represent the central tradition in British philosophy as well as some of the most important and influential thinkers in human history. Their ideas paved the way for modern thought from politics to science, ethics to religion. _The British Empiricists_ is a wonderfully clear and concise introduction to the lives, careers and views of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Russell, and Ayer. Stephen Priest examines each philosopher and their views on a wide range of topics including mind and (...) matter, ethics and emotions, freedom and the physical world, language, truth and logic. The book is usefully arranged so that it can be read by thinker or by topic, or as a history of key philosophical problems and equips the reader to: recognize and practice philosophical thinking understand the methods of solving philosophical problems used by the British Empiricists appreciate the role of empiricism in the history of Western philosophy. For any student new to philosophy, Western philosophy or the British Empiricists, this masterly survey offers an accessible engaging introduction. (shrink)

The word ‘logic’ has many senses. Here we will understand it as meaning an account of what follows from what and why. With contemporary methodology, logic in this sense – though it may not always have been thought of in this way – is a branch of applied mathematics. This has various implications for how one understands a number of issues concerning validity. In this paper I will explain this perspective of logic, and explore some of its consequences with respect (...) to the notion of logical form. (shrink)

Published in the American Journal of Bioethics.

There is a genuine and profound problem about what it consists in for anything to be yourself. Once (perhaps per impossibile) all the empirical and modal facts about a particular human being are in, it still remains unexplained both what being you is, and why that human being is yourself. Being you seems an “extra” feature of anything. The problem admits of no scientific solution, and “being you” resists any purely logical analysis. It is argued that the problem is metaphysical, (...) and that because metaphysical problems have theological answers, being you, and why anything is you may only be explained theologically. You are this soul, this immaterial presence, created by God. A new argument for the existence of God, the Autological Argument, is briefly presented. (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.

Badici [2008] criticizes views of Priest [2002] concerning the Inclosure Schema and the paradoxes of self-reference. This article explains why his criticisms are to be rejected.

Dirac’s treatment of his well known Delta function was apparently inconsistent. We show how to reconstruct his reasoning using the inconsistency-tolerant technique of Chunk and Permeate. In passing we take note of limitations and developments of that technique.

Draft of forthcoming article in the Journal of Medical Ethics where I discuss ethical tension between LGBT testimony and testimonial trust of medical professionals.

From his earliest student days through the writing of his last book, Charles Darwin drew diagrams. In developing his evolutionary ideas, his preferred form of diagram was the tree. An examination of several of Darwin’s trees—from sketches in a private notebook from the late 1830s through the diagram published in the Origin—opens a window onto the role of diagramming in Darwin’s scientific practice. In his diagrams, Darwin simultaneously represented both observable patterns in nature and conjectural narratives of evolutionary history. He (...) then brought these natural patterns and narratives into dialogue, allowing him to explore whether the narratives could explain the patterns. But Darwin’s diagrams did not reveal their meaning directly to passive readers; they required readers to engage dynamically with them in order to understand the connections they disclosed between patterns and narratives. Moreover, the narratives Darwin depicted in his diagrams did not represent past sequences of events that he claimed had actually occurred; the narratives were conjectural, schematic, and probabilistic. Instead of depicting actual histories in all their particularity, Darwin depicted narratives in his diagrams in order to make general claims about how nature works. The conjunction of these features of Darwin’s diagrams is central to how they do their epistemic work. (shrink)

In early Buddhist logic, it was standard to assume that for any state of a ff airs there were four possibilities: that it held, that it did not, both, or neither. This is the catuskoti (or tetralemma). Classical logicians have had a hard time mak­ing sense of this, but it makes perfectly good sense in the se­mantics of various paraconsistent logics, such as First Degree Entailment. Matters are more complicated for later Buddhist thinkers, such as Nagarjuna, who appear to suggest (...) that none of these options , or more than one, may hold. The point of this paper is to examine the matter, including the formal logical machinery that may be appropriate. (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)

After indicating why this is needed, the paper proves a non-triviality result for paraconsistent theory containing arithmetic, naive truth and denotation predicates, and descriptions. The result is obtained by dualising a construction of Kroon. Its most notable feature is that there is a trivial object- one that has every property.

In 1910, Jan Łukasiewicz published a groundbreaking book, On the Principle of Contradiction in Aristotle. The book contained a critique of the traditional attitude to the Principle of Non-Contradiction, and a reevaluation of its significance in the light of contemporary developments in logic. In the first half of the book, Łukasiewicz produced an analysis of Aristotle’s defence of the Principle in the Metaphysics, showing its deep inadequacy. In the second half of the book, Łukasiewicz, in his own terms, considers the (...) pros and cons of the principle. The present paper provides an analysis and commentary on the second half of the book. Łukasiewicz is seen to be badly torn. Though he eventually endorses the principle, he does so, not in virtue of the evidence he considers, but in despite of it. In particular, he considers arguments against the Principle, drawn from Hegel, Meinong, and the paradoxes of self-reference, but rejects them for what appear to be patently inadequate reasons. (shrink)

This article concerns the work of the prime movers of the Neo-Meinongian “revival,” Terry Parsons and Richard Routley, and specifically their solution to the issue of how to formulate the Characterisation Principle (a thing that is so and so, is so and so). Both adopted variations of the nuclear/non-nuclear (characterising/non-characterising) strategy. This article discusses their implementations of the strategy and its problems.

In both occidental and oriental traditions, philosophers have long treated the martial arts as pursuits worthy of philosophical reflection. This is the first substantial academic book to lay out the philosophical terrain within the study and understanding of the martial arts and to explore the significance of this fascinating subject for contemporary philosophy. The book is divided into three sections. The first section concerns what philosophical reflection can teach us about the martial arts, and especially the nature and value of (...) its practice. The second section deals with the other direction of the dialectical interplay between philosophy and the martial arts: how the martial arts can inform philosophical issues important in their own right. Finally, because many of the notable martial arts are of Asian origin, there are particularly close links between the arts and Asian philosophies - and Buddhism in particular - and therefore the last section is devoted to this topic. The essays in this collection deal with a wide range of philosophical issues: normative ethics, meta-ethics, aesthetics, phenomenology, the philosophy of mind, Ancient Greek and Buddhist thought. By demonstrating the very real nature of the engagement between the martial arts and philosophy, this book is essential reading for any serious student or scholar with an interest in the martial arts, Eastern philosophy, the philosophy of sport, or the study of physical culture. (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.

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)

1. Dialectic, in the sense of Hegel and Marx, is a dynamic process in which contradictions arise and are aufgehoben—an impossible word to translate into English, since it means both removed and pre...

This paper sketches an analysis of the development of 20th-century philosophy. Starting with the foundational work of Frege and Husserl, the paper traces two parallel strands of philosophy developing from their work. It diagnoses three phases of development: the optimistic phase, the pessimistic phase, and finally the phase of fragmentation. The paper ends with some speculations as to where philosophy will go this century.