Knowra Dharmakīrti Dharmakīrti Dharmakīrti was a seventh-century Indian Buddhist philosopher who developed influential accounts of logic, perception, inference, and reliable knowledge.
Dignāga : A fifth- or sixth-century Indian Buddhist philosopher who systematized Buddhist logic and epistemology. Dharmakīrti recast and extended Dignāga’s framework of perception and inference.
Three modes of inference : The conditions that make a reason relevant to a subject, present in similar cases, and absent in dissimilar cases. These conditions structure Dharmakīrti’s test for whether a sign supports its conclusion.
Indian Buddhist philosophy : Philosophical traditions that developed within Indian Buddhism across metaphysics, logic, ethics, and knowledge. Dharmakīrti’s work belongs to a broader Buddhist debate with rival Indian schools.
Tibetan Buddhist epistemology : The Tibetan scholastic study of cognition, reasoning, and reliable knowledge rooted in Indian Buddhist texts. Tibetan curricula made Dharmakīrti’s works central to formal reasoning and debate.
Pramāṇa : A reliable means of knowledge, commonly identified in Indian philosophy as perception or inference. Dharmakīrti’s epistemology asks which means of knowledge can reliably establish a claim.
Causal efficacy : The capacity of an entity to produce effects through causal interaction. Dharmakīrti uses causal efficacy to distinguish real particulars from conceptual constructions.
Nyāya : An Indian philosophical school known for its theories of logic, perception, inference, and debate. Nyāya philosophers disputed Buddhist accounts of perception, universals, and valid inference.
Sakya Paṇḍita : A thirteenth-century Tibetan scholar who wrote influential works on logic, language, and Buddhist philosophy. His treatments of logic and language engage the tradition shaped by Dharmakīrti.
Perception : The immediate awareness of objects through sensory or mental cognition. He treats perception as non-conceptual cognition and distinguishes it from inference.
Non-conceptual cognition : Cognition that does not classify its object through concepts, names, or linguistic distinctions. It characterizes perception in his account of the two reliable means of knowledge.
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