Blackwell Reference Online

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Dharmakārti (c. 600–660 ce), an Indian Buddhist philosopher, developed and expanded the work of diṅnāga, and in doing so introduced many new ideas into the Indian debate. His works shaped the evolution of Buddhist philosophical thought in India and Tibet. Dharmakārti's major logical-epistemological treatises are: (1) pramāavārttika, his opus classicus on the means of knowing (pramāa); (2) Nyāyabindu, a very useful introduction to his logical work, commented on and translated many times; (3) Vādanyāya, a manual of debating technique; and (4) Santānāntarasiddhi, an attempted refutation of solipsism.Dharmakārti's philosophical outlook is broadly idealistic. diṅnāga had argued that thought is self-intimating, that every thought is refiexively aware of itself as well as its object. His argument was that we are capable of recalling not just past events but also past experiences. Given that memory presupposes a prior existence of the thing remembered, it follows that we must experience our own experiences. Dharmakārti took this self-intimation thesis as a premise in his celebrated argument for idealism. If every awareness of an object is also an awareness of itself, then the object and my awareness of the object are invariably co-apprehended. Trading on a version of leibniz'S law that indiscernibles are identical, Dharmakārti claimed that it follows that the object and my awareness of ... log in or subscribe to read full text