ABSTRACT
This is a study of some practices of reasoning of Tibetan Buddhist monks. Particularly, I am trying to learn what resources formal analytic reasoning places in the hands of able thinkers. The inquiry was initially motivated by my interest in what may be the limits of logical analysis, but gradually I came to examine more seriously as well what were the benefits that formal analytic reasoning offers to these scholars. My interest in what might be called a ‘philosophical anthropology’ was motivated by my reading of Edmund Husserl’s ‘criticism of reason’ in his Formal and Transcendental Logic and by Emmanuel Levinas’s account of the necessary betrayal by formal philosophy in his Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. What is it about formal analysis and logic that compels Tibetan monks to devote years and decades to its study when their aims are predominantly spiritual ones? And how diabolical, and untamable, can the constrictions that formalized thought places upon original thinking be, despite the philosophers’ best intentions? Even more basically, what is formal reasoning as an in-situ, empirical matter for ethnomethodological discovery? By ethnomethodology, I refer to the study of the local practices of congregations of people engaged in developing generic representations of their minutely detailed, social interaction. It is these locally produced generic representations that assist them in making their interaction orderly.
