Comments on: Dialetheism

By: What does postmodernism perform? | Love of All Wisdom

What does postmodernism perform? | Love of All Wisdom — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:04:00 +0000

[...] that narrow group of paradoxes which could be taken as true on the grounds of Graham Priest’s dialetheism. Priest tries to argue that most of the problems with contradiction stem not from accepting some [...]

By: Truth and contradiction beyond propositions | Love of All Wisdom

Truth and contradiction beyond propositions | Love of All Wisdom — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:02:55 +0000

[...] reading Graham Priest’s work, I was particularly struck by a point Priest makes at length in his Stanford Encyclopedia article: [...]

By: skholiast

skholiast — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:10:14 +0000

I ought to also have said thanks for mentioning Speculum Criticum Taditionis. I just posted something there making some side-reference to Buddhism, apropos Nietzsche. I’d be glad to have the input of someone who’s seriously studied the Dharma.

By: Amod Lele

Amod Lele — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:45:22 +0000

Thanks! The more I thought about Priest’s articles, the more I thought there might be something there. Dialetheism is probably something that will be sitting in the back of my mind for quite a while.

By: skholiast

skholiast — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:19:45 +0000

A very interesting and measured reading. I’m intrigued by the way you equitably take with one hand (“what would his being right imply? Far less, I suspect, than he claims: certainly not that nothing about contradictions is bad”) and give with the other (“if it were to be the case that the Madhyamakas are indeed correct, then Priest’s view might turn out to be more significant than he himself is ready to claim.”) It feels to some degree like Keats’ Negative Capability. It is indeed easy to mock (“it’s all relative” is as cliche as it gets now), and can serve as an excuse not to think. (My suspicion is that it plays into Wilber’s ‘pre/trans fallacy’). But my sense is that figuring out where “all other things are not equal,” as you put it–how (or where) “to care and not to care,” as Eliot says, about inconsistency– is at least one of the major lessons of wisdom.