Nāgārjuna’s Negation

Journal of Indian Philosophy 50 (2):307-344 (2022)
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Abstract

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.

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Chris Rahlwes
University of Connecticut

Citations of this work

Nāgārjuna, Madhyamaka, and truth.Chris Rahlwes - 2023 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2):1-24.

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References found in this work

Studies in the way of words.Herbert Paul Grice - 1989 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
On Denoting.Bertrand Russell - 1905 - Mind 14 (56):479-493.
On Denoting.Bertrand Russell - 2005 - Mind 114 (456):873 - 887.
A Natural History of Negation.Laurence R. Horn - 1989 - University of Chicago Press.
On referring.Peter F. Strawson - 1950 - Mind 59 (235):320-344.

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