Chris Rahlwes

In contemporary philosophy, truth is often restricted to propositions or their bearers. Other uses of “true”—as in the case of “true friend”—are seen as philosophically insignificant. Arguments for this restriction are few and far between and require elaboration. By integrating contemporary and early modern views, we address this need by presenting two principal arguments for such restriction. The first argument concerns the primary and literal sense of “truth,” and the second focuses on epistemic usefulness. However, we show that both fail to motivate such a restriction. We argue that nonpropositional accounts of truth in the Tanakh and in Buddhism present unified senses of propositional and nonpropositional truth that resist the charge of epistemic uselessness and, as such, act as counterexamples to both arguments. Specifically, these non‐European accounts of truth show that one should not assume that propositional uses of “truth” are the only philosophically important uses.

The Jaina saptabhaṅgī (seven angles of analysis or types of sentences) has drawn the attention of non-classical logicians due to its unique use of negation, contradiction, and avaktavya (‘unutterable’). In its most basic structure, the saptabhaṅgī appears as: (i) in a certain sense, P; (ii) in a certain sense, not P; (iii) in a certain sense, P and not P; (iv) in a certain sense, inexpressibility of P; (v) in a certain sense, P and inexpressibility of P; (vi) in a certain sense, not P and inexpressibility of P; (vii) in a certain sense, P, not P, and inexpressibility of P. This appearance has led many (e.g., Ganeri and Priest) to claim that the saptabhaṅgī supports non-classical systems of logic, but such a reading is contested by Balcerowicz. Focusing on Vādidevasūri’s (12th c. CE) and Yaśovijaya’s (17th c. CE) accounts of the saptabhaṅgī, this paper puts forward a formalization of the saptabhaṅgī that brings together the non-classical views and Balcerowicz’s view through relating the saptabhaṅgī to the Buddhist unanswerable questions.

In reading Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, one is struck by Nāgārjuna’s separation of conventional truth and ultimate truth. At the most basic level, these two truths deal with emptiness and the appearance of fundamental existence, but the meaning of “conventional” lends itself to two key senses: concealing and socially agreed-upon norms and practices. The tension between these two senses and how they relate to truth leads Nāgārjuna’s Tibetan commentators in different directions in their exegesis on conventional truth. Based on the debate between Tsongkhapa and Gorampa, I propose a Madhyamaka account of truth as trust. In so doing, I provide a novel account of truth, in which propositions and phenomena are truth-bearers, and one’s ability to trust in them establishes their truth-value.

The logical analysis of Nāgārjuna’s catuṣkoṭi has remained a heated topic for logicians in Western academia for nearly a century. At the heart of the catuṣkoṭi, the four corners’ formalization typically appears as: A, Not A, Both, and Neither. The pulse of the controversy is the repetition of negations in the catuṣkoṭi. Westerhoff argues that Nāgārjuna in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā uses two different negations: paryudāsa and prasajya-pratiṣedha. This paper builds off Westerhoff’s account and presents some subtleties of Nāgārjuna’s use of these negations regarding their scope. This is achieved through an analysis of the Sanskrit and Tibetan Madhyamaka commentarial tradition and through a grammatical analysis of Nāgārjuna’s use of na and a- within a diverse variety of the catuṣkoṭi within the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.