The logic and metaphysical critique of Nagarjuna's thought

In the ancient India, principles of logic, for instance the principle of non-contradiction, were known although they were not proper subjects of study. Nagarjuna, an Indian philosopher who lived in the 2nd century AD, started to write on logic and collected the literature available back then. Nagarjuna attempted to prove that showing reality in a certain way and asbeing in-itself, relying on that logic, is an illusion which results from attributing substantiality to something by employing the possibilities of logic as a vehicle through the concepts of svabhava, sunya, nirvana ve catuskoti. In contemporary western thought we witness a similar criticisim in Late Wittgenstein's way of thinking. He, too, strives to dispose the idea that language has an inherent logic and that logic offers us a depiction of reality, and that we can only engage in philosophy in this way. Nevertheless this anti-metaphysical stance tends to ungergo a change in the second half of the 20th century due to the developments in modal logic which allows for models of non-classical logics. Some contemporary logicians, the English philosopher Graham Priest being a leading figüre among them, have started to defend the views that natural language contains contradictions and hence that the reality depicted by this language should contain contradictions, that is it should contain an emptiness. FurthermorePriest reaches the conclusionthat this way of thinking the Western metaphysics approximates to the Indian metaphysics. We think that this idea of Priest can be interpreted as a commentary on the Middle Way philosophy that Nagarjuna put forward in his booksnearly two millenia ago. In this thesis, Nagarcuna's thought, concepts and echoes of his ideasare evaluated in this context to try to find an answer to the question whether the metaphysics approximates to the Indian metaphysics or not and if the Indian metaphysics can provide a opening, while bearing in mind the critical evaluations Priest has expressed about the Western metaphysics.