Dialectical Practice in Tibetan Philosophical Culture
Regular price
€67.99
A01=Kenneth Liberman
Asian studies
Author_Kenneth Liberman
Category=QRFB21
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
Product details
- ISBN 9780742556126
- Weight: 517g
- Dimensions: 153 x 230mm
- Publication Date: 26 Sep 2007
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Tibetan Buddhist scholar-monks have long engaged in face-to-face public philosophical debates. This original study challenges Orientalist text-based scholarship, which has overlooked 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. During his three years in residence at Tibetan monastic universities, Liberman observed and videotaped the monks' debates. He then transcribed, translated, and analyzed them using multimedia software and ethnomethodological techniques, which enabled him to scrutinize the local methods that Tibetan debaters use to keep their philosophical inquiries alive. His study shows the monks rely on such indigenous dialectical methods as extending an opponent's position to its absurd consequences, 'pulling the rug out' from under an opponent, and other lively strategies. This careful investigation of the formal philosophical work of Tibetan scholars is a pathbreaking analysis of an important classical tradition.
Kenneth Liberman is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.
