Professor Graham Priest

Mercator-Fellow

Graham Priest is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, Boyce Gibson Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne, and International Research Fellow at the Ruhr University of Bochum.

He is known for his work on non-classical logic, particularly in connection with dialetheism, on metaphysics, on the history of philosophy, and on Buddhist philosophy. He has published over 300 papers in nearly every major logic and philosophy journal. His books include: In Contradiction, Beyond the Limits of Thought, Introduction to Non-Classical Logic, Towards Non-Being, One, The Fifth Corner of Four and Capitalism—its Nature and its Replacement. 

For further details, see https://grahampriest.net 

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Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
problem to be solved

“Contradiction is not primarily a problem to be solved but a motor we cannot do without.”

Martin Nonhoff
space

“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.

Julia Lossau
Is contradiction eurocentric?

“Is contradiction a eurocentric concept, operational phenomenon, and instrument of power?”

Kerstin Knopf
Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf