Episode 123: Graham Priest discusses Buddhist metaphysics
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What is the focus of today’s episode and who is the guest?
Hello everyone, my name is Long Deng and I'm an intern at Elucidations. On this episode of the podcast, Matt and Henry spoke to Graham Priest, distinguished professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, about Buddhist metaphysics. Topics of the conversation range from dialetheism, the view that there are statements which are both true and false, to the four noble truths in Buddhist metaphysics. According to Priest, Buddhist metaphysics physics is not a pessimistic philosophy. It provides in effect a way to deal with the suffering, frustration, and unhappiness of human life. by examining the cause of unhappiness and ways by which you could change your state of mind. If you have any questions or comments, tweet us at Elucidations Pod
Enjoy.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations. I'm Matt Teichman.
And I'm Henry Curtis.
With us today is Graham Priest, distinguished professor of philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. And he is here to discuss Buddhist metaphysics. Grand Priest, welcome.
Thanks, Matt. Hi Matt. Henry.
So one thing we were interested in asking you about is uh how you came to be interested in either Buddhism or Buddhist philosophy.
Well, it's like this.
How did Graham Priest become interested in Buddhist philosophy?
For a start, I wasn't trained as a philosopher, I was trained as a mathematician. So, um, for reasons I still don't understand properly, I was given a job in a philosophy department and I spent many years educating myself in philosophy, uh reading, teaching and so on. And after twenty, twenty five years I started to think that I had a handle on philosophy, the big picture. And then I met uh now a man who's now an old friend, Jay Garfield, who knew a lot about Asian philosophy and I knew nothing. And talking to Jay, it made me realise that I was ignorant of half the world's philosophy. My horizon extended no further west east than um Russia or Turkey. Um And so I came to understand that there was a lot of the world's philosophy I needed to know more about.
And so I spent the time since then teaching myself or learning about the Asian traditions. Yeah, I haven't lost an interest in the Western traditions, far from it. But I've just been trying to find out what's happening on the other side of the East West Divide, as it were. And there's a fascinating amount of stuff that would interest.
You've been widely known and associated with the position of dialetheism. And it seems like there in the Buddhist metaphysics that you've written about, there's a lot of space where dialetheism can kind of play a role in elucidating some of the metaphysical positions. Could you maybe say a little bit about the relation between the two and whether or not chronologically the interest in dialetheism came first and advocating for that as a position or the interest in studying?
Okay. Well the chronological thing first. What made me interested in dialethism many, many years ago uh were issues from logic, particularly things like Girdle's incompleteness theorems, um the paradox of self reference and so on. So that's what set me on the dialethic path, as it were. And then over the next twenty years uh years or so I started to investigate the possibility of dialethe in other areas, for example by reading Hegel and legal philosophy and so on. So at that point there's absolutely nothing to do with the Asian traditions. What interested me in the Asian traditions originally also had nothing to do with dialetism. It was just that I I I found the philosophical ideas that you get in many of the traditions, Asian traditions, especially I guess Buddhism interests me more of all these traditions.
Um I f I found those fascinating. But as, you know, I thought about them more and talked to people about them so on, it did seem to me that there was scope for applications of dialethism in the Asian traditions. So some things I've done over the years since I got to know something about Asian philosophy has been exploring the applications of dialethism to uh the Asian traditions and and particularly Buddhism, I guess.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the focus of today’s episode and who is the guest?
0:00–1:40
2
How did Graham Priest become interested in Buddhist philosophy?
1:40–6:34
3
What is dialetheism and how does it connect to Buddhist metaphysics?
6:34–10:56
4
How does Priest define metaphysics and what questions does it address?
10:56–15:56
5
What are the major differences between Western and Buddhist metaphysical traditions?
15:56–20:23
6
What is the Madhyamaka view of emptiness and relational existence?
20:23–24:21
7
How do Buddhist ideas about the self compare to Hume’s philosophy?
24:21–29:25
8
Which contemporary analytic metaphysics debates can Buddhist thought illuminate?
29:25–47:45
Speakers
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