Sub-Project Reasoning in South Asian and Tibetan Buddhism (MC 13.2)

Project Leader: Birgit Kellner

Independent of European influence, sophisticated theories of logic and dialectical argumentation in debate were developed in South Asia, with significant contributions by Buddhist thinkers. With the spread of Buddhism, these were creatively as well as selectively appropriated in China and Tibet. On the backdrop of the migration and transformation of such theories and their core concepts, this project focuses especially on their relationship to practices and strategies of argumentation primarily in particular schools and fields of Buddhist philosophy. Considering the importance of debate practice and a dialogical style of argumentation in Classical South Asian philosophy, we also attempted to explore novel ways to model historical forms of argumentation in close collaboration with experts in dynamic and dialogical logic.
The specific research foci in this subproject were designed and pursued in an integrated process together with the other two subprojects of research group MC 13.