Graham Priest on Dialetheism, True Contradictions, the Liar Paradox & Why Classical Logic Isn’t Enough
From Singularity.FM by Nikola Danaylov
February 12, 2026 · 2h 50m
About this episode
Graham Priest discusses the concept of dialetheism and its implications for logic and truth.
What if some contradictions are not mistakes — but truths? For over 2,500 years, Western philosophy has treated contradiction as catastrophic. From Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction to modern formal systems, logic has operated under one sacred assumption: a statement cannot be both true and false. But what if that assumption is wrong? In this deep, wide-ranging conversation, I sit down with Graham Priest, one of the world’s most influential philosophers of logic and the leading defender of dialetheism — the view that some contradictions are true. We explore: What dialetheism really means Why the liar paradox still unsettles logicians How paraconsistent logic blocks “explosion” (the idea that from a contradiction, anything follows) Whether classical logic is incomplete rather than universal What Buddhist philosophy and Nāgārjuna understood about contradiction And whether AI systems may eventually require non-classical logics to model human reasoning Far from being an abstract puzzle, the liar paradox exposes deep tensions in how we understand truth, self-reference, and rationality itself. If contradictions can be true, then the foundations of logic, mathematics, metaphysics —…
People in this episode
Host: Nikola Danaylov
Guest: Graham Priest
Topics covered
- dialetheism
- logic
- philosophy
- contradictions
- AI reasoning
- Buddhism
- truth
Keywords
- dialetheism
- liar paradox
- classical logic
- paraconsistent logic
- Buddhism
- truth
- contradiction
- AI
- philosophy
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: dialetheism, liar paradox, Buddhist philosophy
More episodes of Singularity.FM
- The Great Progression: Peter Leyden on AI, Trump and the Next 25 Years · May 1, 2026 · 2h 0m
- Steven Kotler on We Are As Gods · April 6, 2026 · 1h 27m
- We Don’t Need More. We Need Better: Intelligence Scales. Wisdom Does Not. · March 25, 2026 · 4 min
- Why I Cancelled ChatGPT and Switched to Claude, And Why You Should Too · March 3, 2026 · 8 min
- Ada Palmer on Inventing the Renaissance: How Golden & Dark Ages Are Constructed and Why They Matter · February 15, 2026 · 3h 2m
- Breaking: Did Integral AI’s Jad Tarifi Just Announce AGI? · December 7, 2025 · 1h 48m
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Singularity.FM podcast page.