Dialectical Practice in Tibetan Philosophical Culture: An Ethnomethodological Inquiry into Formal Reasoning (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780742556126)

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. An accompanying website that offers examples of debating strategies, videos of actual debates (with English translations), and an interactive debate can be found at http: //www.thdl.org/DebateTutorials/.

Author: Kenneth Liberman
ISBN-10: 0742556123
ISBN-13: 9780742556126
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Language: English
Published: 09/01/2007
Pages: 338
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.39lbs
Size: 8.91h x 6.12w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 02/01/2008 pg. 7