How Do Mādhyamikas Think?: Notes on Jay Garfield, Graham Priest, and Paraconsistency
How Do Mādhyamikas Think?: Notes on Jay Garfield, Graham Priest, and Paraconsistency
This chapter explores Jay Garfield and Graham Priest's willingness to read Nāgārjuna and other Mādhyamikas as deliberately, though cogently, inconsistent. While it rejects their view that Mādhyamika logic is paraconsistent in the strong sense that contradictions are literally acceptable, it endorses the view that at least early Mādhyamikas, and perhaps some of their commentators, accept a nonadjunctive logic in which assertions and their denials are each acceptable, but in which they do not conjoin. The chapter shows both nuanced textual scholarship and the judicious application of the techniques of modern logic in the reconstruction of a Buddhist philosophical position regarding the apparently inconsistent, but nonetheless true, conventional and ultimate truths.
Keywords: Nāgārjuna, Mādhyamika, Buddhism, Buddhist philosophy, nonadjunctive logic
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