Categoria: Curriculum Episteme, Curriculum Theoretic
Graham Priest teaches at CUNY, University of Melbourne and at the University of St. Andrews.
Topic of the course
Nothingness is a profound thing. God is supposed to have created the world out of it; Heidegger said that it was the same as being; and members of the  Kyoto School, such as Nishida Kitarō, said that it was ultimate reality. But it is also a puzzling and paradoxical notion. Thus, it is an object. (After all, you’re thinking about it now.). But it cannot be an object, since nothingness it is absence of everything. The aim of this course is to see exactly what it is. This will require careful preparation. We will have to look at some of the basic ideas of paraconsistency and dialetheiesm, noneism (the theory of non-existence objects), mereology (the theory of parts and wholes), and grounding (that is, ontological dependence). These are some of the important tools in contemporary metaphysics. No knowledge of these will be presupposed. Philosophers we will meet in the course of our discussions include Aristotle, Gabriel, Hegel, Heidegger, Meinong, Nishida, Sartre, and Severino.