Graham Priest

Graham Priest (born 1948) is a British philosopher and logician who is distinguished professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as a regular visitor at the University of Melbourne, where he was Boyce Gibson Professor of Philosophy and also at the University of St Andrews.

Life Priest was educated at St John's College, Cambridge and the London School of Economics. His thesis advisor was John Lane Bell. He also holds a DLitt from the University of Melbourne.

Priest was elected a corresponding fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1995.

In addition to his work in philosophy and logic, Priest practised karate-do. He is 3rd dan, International Karate-do Shobukai; 4th dan, shitō-ryū, and an Australian National kumite referee and kata judge. Presently, he practices tai chi.

Philosophical work Priest is known for his defence of dialetheism, his in-depth analyses of the logical paradoxes (holding the thesis that there is a uniform treatment for many well-known paradoxes, such as the semantic, set-theoretic and liar paradoxes), and his many writings related to paraconsistent and other non-classical logics. In these he draws on the history of philosophy, including Asian philosophy.

Priest, a long-time resident of Australia, now residing in New York City, is the author of numerous books (most notably the textbook An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic), and has published articles in nearly every major philosophical and logical journal. He was a frequent collaborator with the late Richard Sylvan, a fellow proponent of dialetheism and paraconsistent logic.

Priest has also published on metaphilosophy (Beyond the Limits of Thought, 1995/2002).

Hegel In his 1989 essay, Dialectic and Dialetheic, Priest has put forward an interpretation of Hegel's Science of Logic as a kind of "paraconsistent" logic, i.e. a dialetheic logic that allows for the existence of true contradictions.

Books