Dignaga

Dignaga, who lived around 470 to 540 CE, was an Indian Buddhist philosopher and logician credited as one of the Buddhist founders of Indian logic, whose work laid the groundwork for the development of deductive logic in India and created the first system of Buddhist logic and epistemology, known as pramana. According to the scholar Georges Dreyfus, his philosophical school brought about an Indian "epistemological turn" and became the standard formulation of Buddhist logic and epistemology in India and Tibet; his thought influenced later Buddhist philosophers including Dharmakirti as well as Hindu thinkers of the Nyaya school. Dignaga's epistemology accepted only perception and inference as valid instruments of knowledge and introduced the influential theory of exclusion to explain linguistic meaning, and his work on language, inferential reasoning and perception was widely influential among later Indian philosophers.