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Four Corners—East and West

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6521))

Abstract

In early Buddhist logic, it was standard to assume that for any state of affairs there were four possibilities: that it held, that it did not, both, or neither. This is the catuskoti. Classical logicians have had a hard time making sense of this, but it makes perfectly good sense in the semantics of various paraconsistent logics, such as First Degree Entailment. Matters are more complicated for later Buddhist thinkers, such as Nagarjuna, who appear to suggest that none or these options, or more than one, may hold. These possibilities may also be accommodated with contemporary logical techniques. The paper explains how.

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Priest, G. (2011). Four Corners—East and West. In: Banerjee, M., Seth, A. (eds) Logic and Its Applications. ICLA 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6521. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18026-2_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18026-2_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-18025-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-18026-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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