Galloway

Position summary

Galloway is a Western scholar of Buddhist logic who published on the catuṣkoṭi and on Madhyamaka negation in the Journal of Indian Philosophy in the late 1980s. The wiki holds one article, galloway-logical-issues-1989, which is his substantive statement on Madhyamaka and the reason Gokhale engages him.

His governing idea is that the distinction between prasajya and paryudāsa negation is drawn differently by the Mādhyamikas than by anyone else. For the grammarians and the non-Madhyamaka schools, prasajya negates the predicate and paryudāsa complements the term; both leave a statement with content. For the Mādhyamika, any negation that carries an implication is a paryudāsa whatever its syntax, and the properly Madhyamaka negation yields a zero statement — nothing is concluded, neither the proposition nor its negation. Term and predicate are both to be negated prasajyavat. He grounds this on Bhāviveka’s discussion in the Prajñāpradīpa of which negations of “things arise from themselves” are acceptable, and corroborates it from the Tibetan translators’ non-literal renderings med par dgag pa and ma yin par dgag pa.

From that base he defends Nāgārjuna against two standing charges. The excluded middle is not violated: at MMK 15.4 the sets of svabhāva and parabhāva have both been emptied, a bhāva would have to lie in one of them, and it is the bhāva that Nāgārjuna discards, with Buddhapālita and Candrakīrti quoted to that effect. Contraposition is not violated at MMK 13.7 either, once yadi is read as “only if” and empty / non-empty are recognised as pratidvandvins, correlative terms each meaningful only through the other. Murti’s two examples of an allegedly lapsed excluded middle — an integer between 3 and 4, and the rope-snake — are dismantled: meaninglessness is not a third truth-value, and a conflated subject is not a logical anomaly.

He is framework-light rather than framework-absent, and light in an unusual direction. There is no neyārtha / nītārtha apparatus and no Three Turnings, but the pair appears twice as a background assumption — once as licence for reading MMK 13.7 non-literally, and once in a footnote suggesting that the Two Truths distinction may descend from it. Unlike the other framework-external analytic readers here, he argues from the Indian commentators rather than around them: Buddhapālita, Bhāviveka and Candrakīrti all supply load-bearing evidence.

Hermeneutical approach

• Set theory and the predicate calculus applied to Sanskrit and Tibetan primary texts, with notation invented where the existing notation has no provision (0 for the zero statement, by analogy with ∅).
• The Sanskrit grammarians supply the analysis of the two pratiṣedha; the Tibetan translation practice is treated as evidence about meaning rather than as a target of translation criticism.
• Ruegg is the principal modern authority: 1977 for the pratidvandvin point and for semantic well-formedness, 1983 for the two senses of pratijñā.
• Comparative work is refused rather than pursued. Where Kristeva and Mall formalise the tetralemma semiotically, Galloway corrects their mathematics and doubts the application; where Nakamura treats contraposition as a Western peculiarity, he replies that traditional Indian logic holds to it too, and shows Dharmakīrti aware of the equivalence.
• He is willing to read a verse non-literally to avoid attributing a crude error to a major philosopher, and says so as a principle.

Key claims

• The Madhyamaka prasajya negation yields a zero statement: applied to A(x) it licenses neither A(x) nor ¬A(x), because it licenses nothing (galloway-logical-issues-1989 pp. 6–9).
• Nāgārjuna’s lack of a pratijñā just is the zero statement — he makes no statements with content, and the verbal formulations he does make are advanced procedurally to refute others (n. 5, after Ruegg 1983).
• The Tsongkhapa reading of VV 29 transmitted by Lopez (“no inherently existent position”) fails, because on those terms one could hold any position whatever by attaching the qualifier; and having no position paramārthavat is in any case not nihilism (n. 5, p. 27).
• The negative catuṣkoṭi is coherent because the four corners are each zeroed and the subject is denied, not because a law of logic is suspended (pp. 18–19).
• MMK 15.4 affirms the excluded middle and rejects the bhāva; those who say Nāgārjuna rejects the law should show where he says so (pp. 19–20).
• MMK 13.7 commits no contraposition fallacy once yadi is read as “only if” (pp. 22–24).
• The middle way is ontologically “merely the absence of error on one side together with its absence on the other; a twofold absence of deviation is not a third deviation” (n. 18, p. 31).
• Śūnyatā is not a dharma among dharmas; the Mahāyāna sūtras spend more effort warning against its misapprehension as an entity than advocating it. Concepts like “empty” and “non-empty” have a medical function and are meant to leave the mind once they have worked (n. 7, p. 24).

Related scholars

• Gokhale — takes over Galloway’s answer to Robinson’s fallacy charge and argues that his catuṣkoṭi defence, sound for any single tetralemma, fails under iteration. Whether the objection reaches what Galloway actually argues is unresolved; see galloway-logical-issues-1989 note 4.
• Wood — the substantive opposition, five years later and mutually unaware. Both make the prasajya / paryudāsa distinction the crux and read it in opposite directions.
• Hayes — the immediate successor on the same question in the same journal, who cites him among the tetralemma studies, grants that Nāgārjuna’s logic is standard, and then adds the equivocation charge that neither Galloway nor Robinson had made.
• Ruegg — the authority he builds on throughout, from the 1977 catuṣkoṭi article and the 1983 thesis-and-assertion essay. A third Ruegg strand for the wiki, alongside the Svātantrika–Prāsaṅgika criteria and the 1986 performative-negation essay.
• Murti — refuted directly on the excluded middle, which makes Galloway a second framework-external voice against the absolutist reading alongside Gokhale.
• Buddhapālita, Bhāviveka, Candrakīrti — quoted as evidence rather than surveyed, which distinguishes him from every other modern logician in the wiki.