Biography:Graham Priest

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Short description: British philosopher, born 1948

Graham Priest
Priest in 2017
Born (1948-11-14) 14 November 1948 (age 77)
London, England
Known forAn Introduction to Non-Classical Logic
Academic background
EducationSt John's College, Cambridge
(BA, MA)
LSE
(MSc, PhD)
University of Melbourne
(DLitt)
ThesisA type theory in which variables range over predicates (1975)
Doctoral advisorJohn Lane Bell
Academic work
EraContemporary philosophy
School or traditionAnalytic philosophy
Dialetheism
Noneism[1]
InstitutionsGraduate Center, CUNY
University of Melbourne
University of St Andrews
University of Queensland
University of Western Australia
Ruhr University Bochum
Main interestsLogic, metaphysics, history of philosophy,[2] intercultural philosophy
Notable ideasDialetheism
The other worlds strategy

Graham Priest (born 1948) is a British philosopher and logician who is distinguished professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as a regular visitor at the University of Melbourne, where he was Boyce Gibson Professor of Philosophy and also at the University of St Andrews.

Life

Priest was educated at St John's College, Cambridge[3] and the London School of Economics. His thesis advisor was John Lane Bell. He also holds a DLitt from the University of Melbourne.[4]

Priest was elected a corresponding fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1995.[5]


Philosophical work

Priest is known for his defence of dialetheism, his in-depth analyses of the logical paradoxes (holding the thesis that there is a uniform treatment for many well-known paradoxes, such as the semantic, set-theoretic and liar paradoxes), and his many writings related to paraconsistent and other non-classical logics. In these he draws on the history of philosophy, including Asian philosophy.

Priest, a long-time resident of Australia, now residing in New York City, is the author of numerous books (most notably the textbook An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic), and has published articles in nearly every major philosophical and logical journal. He was a frequent collaborator with the late Richard Sylvan, a fellow proponent of dialetheism and paraconsistent logic.

Priest has also published on metaphilosophy (Beyond the Limits of Thought, 1995/2002).

Hegel

In his 1989 essay, Dialectic and Dialetheic,[6] Priest has put forward an interpretation of Hegel's Science of Logic as a kind of "paraconsistent" logic, i.e. a dialetheic logic that allows for the existence of true contradictions.[7]

Books

References

  1. ↑ Graham Priest, Towards Non-Being: The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. vii.
  2. ↑ Graham Priest's University of Melbourne homepage
  3. ↑ Official website
  4. ↑ Priest's CUNY Graduate Center homepage ; Priest's St. Andrews homepage
  5. ↑ "Fellow Profile: Graham Priest" (in en-AU). https://humanities.org.au/fellows/fellow-profile/?fellow_id=509. 
  6. ↑ Priest, Graham (1989). "Dialectic and Dialetheic". Science & Society 53 (4): 388–415. ISSN 0036-8237. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40403028. 
  7. ↑ Redding, Paul (2025), Zalta, Edward N.; Nodelman, Uri, eds., "Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2025/entries/hegel/, retrieved 2026-07-08