Nagarjuna and the Limits of Thought

Abstract

Nagarjuna seems willing to embrace contradictions while at the same time making use of classic reductio arguments. He asserts that he rejects all philosophical views including his own-that he asserts nothing-and appears to mean it. It is argued here that he, like many philosophers in the West and, indeed, like many of his Buddhist colleagues, discovers and explores true contradictions arising at the limits of thought. For those who share a dialetheist's comfort with the possibility of true contradictions commanding rational assent, for Nagarjuna to endorse such contradictions would not undermine but instead confirm the impression that he is indeed a highly rational thinker. It is argued that the contradictions he discovers are structurally analogous to many discovered by Western philosophers and mathematicians.

Expressives and Expressivity

“…This is problematic in particular for genres such as poetry, which often make direct use of these sorts of associations and shades of meaning. Another sort of example can be found in religious texts, which may require particular modes of interpretation to be comprehensible, which are not necessarily available in other cultural domains (for instance, consider the seemingly contradictory language in some Buddhist texts analyzed by Garfield and Priest 2003). We may now ask whether this kind of difficulty is caused by, or creates, differences in expressive power as well.…”

A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand (Second Edition)

“…Priest's current research has focussed on the metaphysics of the one and the Many. here, he connects themes from buddhist philosophy with contemporary Western logic and metaphysics, to address longstanding issues on the nature of identity, objecthood and individuation (Priest 2001b, Garfield andPriest 2003).…”

On Discourses Addressed by Infidel Logicians

“…4 From contradictoriness to Buddhism, and back It was not, apparently, any idea of a paraconsistent logician, as noted by J. Garfield and G. Priest in [GP02], and in [GP03], to propose that some contradictions in Buddhist reasoning would make them endorse paraconsistent logic: they agree, but credit T. Tillemans in [Til99] for the observation. Garfield and Priest do a decisive step by studying the possibilities that those contradictions could be seen as structurally analogous to those arising in the Western tradition.…”