Graham Priest

Graham Priest is a British-born philosopher and logician, long associated with the University of Melbourne and later with the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. He is the leading defender of dialetheism, the view that some contradictions are true, using paraconsistent logics in which a contradiction does not entail everything. He applies this to paradoxes such as the liar and to the limits of thought, and has also written on Buddhist philosophy, including the catuskoti and Nagarjuna, where his dialetheist reading is one interpretation among others.

Key ideas

• Some contradictions are true; the liar sentence is both true and false.
• Logic should be paraconsistent, so that a contradiction does not entail every proposition.
• Paradoxes at the limits of thought, expression and iteration share a common structure.
• Non-classical logics can illuminate positions in other traditions, including Buddhist uses of the four-cornered argument.

Major works

• In Contradiction (1987)
• Beyond the Limits of Thought (1995)
• An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic (2001)
• The Fifth Corner of Four (2018)

In the conversation

• Question If the One cannot be described, how did Plotinus manage to write so much about it? Chiara Bellandi · 6 replies
• Question What are the seven “in some respect” predications of syādvāda, and is it really a many-valued logic? Tomasz Wójcik · 4 replies
• Debate Reading Nāgārjuna as a dialetheist imports a problem he did not have Meera Kulkarni · 5 replies
• Debate Logic is the one part of philosophy that settles questions, and the rest should take note Derek Hollis · 5 replies
• Debate Global scepticism refutes itself, and the famous escape routes do not work Tomasz Wójcik · 6 replies
• Question Does the dialetheist really believe contradictions, or has she changed the meaning of ‘not’? Tomasz Wójcik · 4 replies