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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 181.043
EAN num: 9780742556126
ISBN number: 0742556123
Label: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing houses, Ltd.
Manufacturer: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing houses, Ltd.
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 338
Printing Date: September 28, 2007
Publishing house: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing houses, Ltd.
Sale Popularity Level: 830207
Studio: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing houses, Ltd.
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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/.
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Dialectical Practice in Tibetan Philosophical Culture: An Ethnomethodological Inquiry into Formal Reasoning by Kenneth Liberman, (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing houses) 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.
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 that 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.
The book is packaged with a CD-ROM that offers photographs of debates; a guide to the participants; a grammar of Tibetan debating, which includes sample propositions, responses, and strategies; the ethnomethods employed by debaters; videos of illustrative debates, complete with English translations, all analyzed in detail in the book; and an appendix comprising an interactive debate, glossary, manual, and illustrations.
Excerpt: During two years at Sera over four separate visits, I videotaped some twenty hours of formal debate, mostly on Madhyamaka topics. I prepared for those by reading most of the critical texts involved, in classes and in private tutorials. The best recordings were filmed during the annual public examinations when each debater was being ranked by a panel of senior scholars. Because they were being evaluated, the debaters put their best arguments forward. Also, the other young scholars present, who would usually be shoving their way in to pose their own questions, respected the priority of the examinee's arguments. These debates were relatively short, typically ten minutes in duration; such a short period provided me with technical detail limited enough for me to be capable of mastering. Of these debates I selected fifteen for transcription, guided by their rankings (which were posted), my own judgment of the debate, and the recommendation of colleagues. I translated all of these fifteen debates and spent many dozens of hours analyzing each one, and more frequently hundreds of hours when the time for the transcribing and translation, and showing them to the debaters being filmed and to other colleagues, is included. My field work required three years of residence in monastic universities, and it was proceeded by six years of Tibetan language study. The transcription, rechecking the transcription, making the translation, rechecking the translation, analyzing, posing questions about my analyses, etc., occupied an additional three years. Only after these tasks did the writing begin, which itself was interrupted by heart surgery, and by having to reanalyze some debates, and also by the need to spend two additional years learning the multimedia programs necessary for me to analyze my tapes digitally and to prepare the digital record on the CD-ROM.
Even after such a length of time I was faced with the questions, how many debates were enough and how much analysis was sufficient. Many ethnomethodological researchers prefer to analyze a few minutes of microinteraction with terrific care and attention. Feeling responsibile to capture the phenomenon in a way that was ethnographically faithful to the broader phenomenon of philosophical discourse among Gelug scholars, I spread my ethnomethodological analyses over a larger corpus (some 150 minutes or so of debating). I learned that when the phenomena came to be familiar, and even began to be repetitive, I had tape-recorded and analyzed a sufficient number of debates. And when my collection had covered a fair portion of the topics raised in the formal classes I at-tended, I considered that I had done justice to the Tibetans' enterprise. It was only after a thousand hours of reviewing the debates that I began to get a sense for the spontaneity of the negative dialectics that Tibetans practice...
Geshe Lhundrup Sopa summarized both the risk and the promise of Tibetan dialectics when he advised, "Just reviewing the arguments as a dead inventory in insufficient. ... Read More
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