Dialectical Practice in Tibetan Philosophical Culture An Ethnomethodological Inquiry into Formal Reasoning

by Liberman, Kenneth; Garfinkel, Harold

• ISBN13: 9780742556126
• ISBN10: 0742556123
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-09-26
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Summary

Tibetan Buddhist scholar-monks have long engaged in face-to-face public philosophical debates. This original study challenges Orientalist text-based scholarship, which has missed these lived practices of Tibetan dialectics. Kenneth Liberman brings these dynamic disputations to life for the modern reader through a richly detailed, turn-by-turn analysis of the monks' formal philosophical reasoning. He argues that Tibetan Buddhists deliberately organize their debates into formal structures that both empower and constrain thinking, skillfully using logic as an interactional tool to organize their reflections. This careful investigation of the formal philosophical work of Tibetan scholars is a pathbreaking analysis of an important classical tradition. The book is packaged with a CD-ROM that offers examples of debating strategies, videos (with English translations) of actual debates, and an interactive debate.

Author Biography

Kenneth Liberman is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Foreword	p. ix
A Postcolonial Inquiry into Tibetan Dialectics	p. 1
Orientalism and Tibetological Praxis	p. 3
Ethnomethodology and the Retrieval of Ordinary Society	p. 25
The Organization of Reasoning in Tibetan Philosophical Debates	p. 51
Philosophical Praxis in the Tibetan Academy	p. 79
Organizing the Objectivity of the Discourse: Dialectics and Communication	p. 81
Reason as a Public Activity	p. 107
Rhymes and Reason: Reason as the In Vivo, Concerted Work of Tibetan Philosophers	p. 121
Strategies in Tibetan Philosophical Debates	p. 165
A Sociology of Reasoning	p. 235
Using Reasons: Capabilities of Formal Analysis	p. 237
Some Betrayals of Formal Analysis	p. 273
Bibliography	p. 309
Index	p. 319
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