ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 27, 2020
The Fifth Corner of Four: An Essay on Buddhist Metaphysics and the Catuṣkoṭi. By Graham Priest. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, xx + 172 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-875871-6 (Hardcover), $60.00.
Reviewed by Ronald S. Green
I read recently, in an article in Le Monde by Roger-Pol Droit, that Hegel, in his last courses on religions in 1931 just before he died of cholera (an epidemic that originated in India 1826), finally acknowledged that there existed in India “true systems of thought.”
Anyway, this discussion on the effable and ineffable is necessarily paradoxical, since per definition an “ineffable” is ineffable, to say nothing of attributing to it the label “existent.” It is, at least, clear that according to Nāgārjuna (if we accept that “ineffable” means “not effable”) to hold the ontological negation as pointing to “something” is to err.