Jonathan Hockey’s Reviews > Beyond the Limits of Thought > Status Update

..appealing to current theories of logic or physics is a form of conventionalism or holism and is clearly a cop out for someone claiming to give their own reasonable arguments for something. It is not to say some of these contradictions may not be inherent in our thinking, but the ontological quagmires it leads to are very naively dismissed due to his unfounded belief in the separateness of formal logic from ontology

His own concerns with the principle of sufficient reason are not well explored or defended and seem instead to just rely on a get out clause of embracing a logic of contradiction whenever he comes across problems giving a reason for something. The general issue I think here is that Priest is unaware of how logical assertions are already tied in with ontological ones and commit him much more than he acknowledges...

A very dismissive approach employed in this book, nearly every time he refuses to argue with past figures on their own terms, and instead resorts to some modern finding of set theory or some current claim of general relativity to argue for him. These considerations have their place, but they show an inability to understand what these historical figures were grappling with on their own terms.

Interesting book so far, and good to see classic works being brought up, however, he tends to have a very presumptuous attitude to it all and is assuming a logical answer to every problem, that leads him towards his contradictions, when maybe perhaps the better answer is to turn away from pure logic and recognise the ontological underpinnings to logical argumentations and address them, rather than their effects