Since the time of Stcherbatsky, the Buddhist “epistemological” school has been considered as paying only lip service to Buddhism as a path toward salvation. If it is true that scholasts such as Dignāga and Dharmakīrti (6thcentury CE) must be credited with an impressive effort toward philosophical clarification in matters pertaining to language, ontology, logic and cognition, they certainly cannot be understood as free thinkers leaving dogmatic and metaphysical assumptions aside. One of the tasks of the historian is to determine the extent to which the philosophy of Dharmakīrti was indebted to dogmatic (Abhidharmic) constructs and found its place in Buddhism as a salvational system. No less urgently, the historian of philosophical ideas is expected to go beyond the mere paraphrase (formalized or not) of arguments and to inquire into the historical matrix in which the most innovative sixth-century systems (epistemology, “tantrism”, etc.) developed. Besides his investigations into arguments proper, the specialist of late Indian Buddhist philosophy is requested to determine the Buddhist meaning of “logic” and “epistemology.” An important feature of this meaning is most certainly the apologetic dimension of sixth- to seventh-century Buddhist philosophy, i.e., the way in which these intellectuals endeavoured to defend Buddhism as a rational system against outward critique (mainly Mīmāṃsā and Materialism).