Dao De Jing and Mūlamadhyamakakārikā

Making sense of ineffability

Graham Priest

University of Melbourne

pp. 57-69

in: Inaugural issue, East Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1), 2021.

Abstract

In a number of philosophical traditions, East and West, there are things that are held to be beyond the limits of language, that are ineffable. Philosophers in these traditions also explain why there are such things, in the process, describing them. The things would hence appear to be both effable and ineffable. Though one may try to wriggle out of these contradictions, the most straightforward response is simply to accept that we are dealing with contradictory objects. In the first part of the paper, we will see how the phenomenon in question arises in the Daoist and Mahāyāna Buddhist traditions. In the second, we will see how the contradiction concering an object which is both effable and ineffable can be handled using the techniques of paraconsistent logic.