In Defense of Dharmakīrti -- A Response to Tanaka

Abstract

In my 2004 article for this journal, I compared Dharmakirti’s consistent account of change with Graham Priest’s dialetheist (inconsistent) theory of motion.1 I contended that they take opposite positions on the law of noncontradiction (the thesis that no contradiction is true), and I argued that Dharmakirti’s theory was preferable, particularly in the light of modern physics. In his interesting comment, Koji Tanaka takes me to task for overestimating the resources Dharmakirti has for his theory. Correlatively, he argues that Dharmakirti cannot resist the full force of Priest’s arguments and thus ought to succumb to his dialetheist account. In this response, I argue that the additional arguments that Tanaka brings forward in Priest’s name are unsound, and that in consequence Dharmakirti’s position remains standing.