This feels somewhat related to our discussion on logic over the last week. Priest’s essay left my mind feeling like it had been twisted into a knot (in a good way). I have some sympathy with the skepticism Massimo’s expresses in his write up, although I still found Priest’s essay thought provoking. Although it probably wasn’t the intent, I found both essays reminding me of the limitations of logic I wrote about last week.
by Massimo Pigliucci
Graham Priest is a colleague of mine at City University of New York’s Graduate Center, a world renowned expert in logic, a Buddhist connoisseur, and an all-around nice guy [1]. So I always pay attention to what he says or writes. Recently he published a piece in Aeon magazine [2] entitled “Beyond true and false: Buddhist philosophy is full of contradictions. Now modern logic is learning why that might be a good thing.” I approached it with trepidation, for a variety of reasons. To begin with, I am weary of attempts at reading things into Buddhism or other Asian traditions of thought that are clearly not there (the most egregious example being the “documentary” What The Bleep Do We Know?, and the most frustrating one the infamous The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra). But I quickly reassured myself because I knew Graham would do better than…
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