Beyond the Limits of Thought

Rating:
Summary: The One and the Many
Review: This is a fascinating and clearly written book of philosophy that deals with the problems that arise when we try to characterize the inherent limitations of human thought. Priest's position ("dialethism") is that in doing so, we inevitably contradict ourselves, and hence that the law of non-contradiction should be rejected.

Priest's argument here depends upon the crucial claim that a wide variety of apparent paradoxes in set theory, semantics, philosophical psychology and metaphysics exhibit a common structure, and hence require a "uniform solution." To the extent that his very wide-ranging and often insightful discussion of how these paradoxes have arisen in the writings of philosophers throughout history convinces one of this, dialethism does start to look awfully difficult to avoid. But in trying to describe this structure (which Priest refers to as the "inclosure schema," and finds identified most explicitly in the work of Georg Cantor), he ascends to such a high level of generality and abstraction that I found it difficult to swallow his demand for "uniformity." The crude system of classification that he uses to group together most other philosophers' attempts to resolve the relevant paradoxes without giving up on the law of non-contradiction reinforces this impression. He accuses so many different writers of using the supposedly lame strategy of "parametrization" that I simply have no idea what this word is supposed to refer to by the end of the book.

Nonetheless, Priest's work makes for exciting reading for anyone who thinks that analytic philosophy has been in the doldrums since the glory days of Quine and Davidson. Priest has a genuinely novel way of looking at the world. And his synthesis of logical rigor and historical sensitivity in the treatment of an extraordinarily diverse range of texts is rare indeed.