Acknowledgments -- Foreword / Harold Garfinkel -- pt. 1. A postcolonial inquiry into Tibetan dialectics -- 1. Orientalism and Tibetological praxis -- 2. Ethnomethodology and the retrieval of ordinary society -- 3. The organization of reasoning in the Tibetian philosophical debates -- pt. 2. Philosophical praxis in the Tibetan academy -- 4. Organizing the objectivity of the discourse : dialectics and communication -- 5. Reasons as a public activity -- 6. Rhymes and reason : reason as the in vivo, concerted work of Tibetan philosophers -- 7. Strategies in Tibetan philosophical debates -- pt. 3. A sociology of reasoning -- 8. Using reasons : capabilities of forma analysis -- 9. Some betrayals of formal analysis -- Bibliography -- Index.

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.

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Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-317) and index.

English.