Graham Priest：Jaśkowski and the Jains

Graham Priest, a world-renowned logician and philosopher, is 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, metaphysics, the history of philosophy, and Buddhist philosophy.  He has published over 300 articles—in nearly every major philosophy and logic journal—and eight books—mostly with Oxford University Press.

In 1948 Jaśkowski introduced the first discussive logic. The main dtechnical idea was to take what holds to be what is true at some possible world. Some 2,000 years earlier, Jain philosophers had advocated a similar idea, in their doctrine of syādvāda. Of course, these philosophers had no knowledge of contemporary logical notions; but the techniques pioneered by Jaśkowski can be deployed to make the Jain ideas mathematically precise. Moreover, Jain ideas suggest a new family of many-valued discussive logics. In this talk, I will explain all these matters.