Event Detail

Dialetheism––the view that some contradictions are true––is closely associated with non-classical logics, specifically with paraconsistent logic. For champions of paraconsistent logic, the presence of non-trivially inconsistent theories opens up the possibility that reality itself is inconsistent. Garfield and Priest (2003), Deguchi, Garfield, and Priest (2008), and Deguchi, Garfield, Priest, and Sharf (2021) have argued that much like some philosophers in the West (e.g., Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Heidegger), philosophers in the Indian Buddhist and Chan/Zen traditions (e.g., Nāgārjuna, Dōgen, Nishida) may have discovered and explored a series of paradoxes that arise at the limits of thought. Drawing mainly on Nāgārjuna’s key work, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, I will first review several instances in which language, particularly when used self-referentially, is prone to paradox. I will then contrast paradoxes of expressibility with the view that in some narrow cases, reality itself or, at the very least, a layered conception of it might instantiate paradoxes. Finally, I argue that although certain reductio arguments about the fundamental structure of reality may tempt us to accept the possibility of ontological paradoxes, the rationale for doing so is ultimately ill-founded. If grounding is understood as the determination of what is fundamental, then it should function as an ordering principle for what exists—that is, for what is real, possible, or merely contingent—rather than as a principle that constrains what, if anything, can be said about the unsayable.