In Defense of Dharmakīrti -- A Response to Tanaka

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. Informally, the phenomenon of change combined with Leibniz' Law drives us into a contradiction, and since Dharmakirti rejects contradictions, we get momentariness, the doctrine that the basic existing things only exist instantaneously. The resources of mereology, the theory of the part-whole relation, permit us to identify a collection of distinct instantaneous slices as a whole (in Buddhist language, an aggregate).