Akalanka

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Akalanka (8th cent. CE). A Digambara Jain philosopher and logician. According to biographies written centuries after his death, he regarded Buddhists as his greatest intellectual opponents, and he organized his arguments to eradicate their viewpoint. The relativism of his outlook required a careful defence of Jain epistemology. His main achievement was to realize that the traditional division of inference (svārthānumāna and parārthānumāna) can be extended, so that something akin to the abductive inference of Peirce is anticipated.