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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Zeno of Elea

Dialectical and demonstrative argument

27 Sunday Jun 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Dialectic, Epistemology, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Pre-Socratics, Truth

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Peimin Ni, Plato, postmodernism, relativism, René Descartes, Socrates, Zeno of Elea

I closed my post about Peimin Ni’s gongfu with an important argument of Ni’s, which I didn’t have the space to address there. I had been arguing against Ni’s ends-relativist viewpoint, in which philosophies were judged by their pragmatic effectiveness. Ni made a vital point in response: he noted that I was myself arguing merely based on pragmatic effectiveness, and not on the grounds of the larger metaphysical truth I hope to proclaim. He was absolutely right about this – but it is by design. Continue reading →

Dialetheism

03 Wednesday Feb 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Logic, Mahāyāna, Pre-Socratics, Truth

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Graham Priest, Madhyamaka, Nāgārjuna, Ryan Lake, Śāntideva, skholiast (blogger), Zeno of Elea

In response to last week’s post about contradictions, a reader who goes by “skholiast” (who has his own blog, Speculum Criticum Traditionis) pointed me to the interesting work of analytic philosopher Graham Priest, author of works with provocative titles like “What is so bad about contradictions?” Priest advocates a position that he calls dialetheism, from the Greek for “two truths,” according to which a belief or statement and its opposite can both be true – even at the same time and in the same respect, directly contradicting Aristotle’s classical law of non-contradiction. He concludes the article with this provocative claim: “So what is so bad about contradictions? Maybe nothing.”

Dialetheism is easy to mock. Indeed, the first I’d heard of it, and the only time I’d heard of it before skholiast’s post, was in two of Ryan Lake’s Chaospet comics that made fun of it. Lake’s comics note apparent problems with dialetheism: if nothing is bad about contradictions, as Priest suggests, then doesn’t that basically allow one to say anything at all? Doesn’t one then just immediately solve every hard problem without having to think about it, by saying (as Lake’s character Nester does) that “the mind both is and is not the brain”?
Continue reading →

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