Crossing the Stream, Leaving the Cave: Buddhist-Platonist Philosophical Inquiries

Crossing the Stream, Leaving the Cave brings philosophers from two of the world’s great philosophical traditions--Platonic and Indian Buddhist--into joint inquiry on topics in metaphysics, epistemology, mind, language, and ethics. An international team of scholars address selected questions of mutual concern to Buddhist and Platonist: How can knowledge of reality transform us? Will such transformation leave us speechless, or disinterested in the world around us? What is cause? What is self-knowledge? And how can dreams shed light on waking cognition? What do the paradoxes thrown up by abstract thought about fundamental notions such as being and unity reveal? Is it possible to attain unity in ourselves, and should we even try? Would doing so make us happy--and is such happiness consistent with both contemplation of reality and action in the world? With close readings of texts by Buddhaghosa, Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Dignaga, Bhaviveka, Santideva; by Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, Olympiodorus, and Damascius (among others), these studies consider not just the different answers Buddhists and Platonists might give to these questions, but also the criticisms they might bring to each other’s positions, the sort of arguments they use, and the use they put these arguments to. Bringing Platonic and the Buddhist perspectives jointly to bear creates a cosmopolitan philosophical exchange which yields greater conceptual clarity on the questions and the terms in which they are cast, reveals unnoticed conceptual connections, and opens up new possibilities for addressing central philosophical concerns.

Amber D. Carpenter, Associate Professor, Philosophy, Yale-NUS College, Pierre-Julien Harter, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Professor of Philosophy in Buddhist Studies, Department of Philosophy, University of New Mexico

Amber Carpenter wrote her PhD on Plato’s Philebus at King’s College London. She taught at Oxford, St. Andrews, and the University of York, where an Anniversary Fellowship and an Einstein Fellowship (from the Einstein Forum, Potsdam) supported work on Indian Buddhist philosophy. Her monograph Indian Buddhist Philosophy appeared in 2014, the same year she moved to Yale-NUS College (Singapore). With Rachael Wiseman, she ran the Integrity Project, from 2012 to 2020, when their edited collection, Portraits of Integrity, appeared. She has held visiting research appointments/fellowships with University of Melbourne, Yale University, and the Moral Beacons Project (Templeton Religious Trust).

Pierre-Julien Harter is an alumnus of the École Normale SupÃ(c)rieure (Paris) and the University of Chicago, and is assistant professor of philosophy and The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Professor of Philosophy in Buddhist Studies at University of New Mexico. He specializes in Buddhist philosophy in India and Tibet. His research on the Buddhist concept of the path has nurtured his wide-ranging interests in different aspects of Buddhist thought, such as metaphysics and ontology, epistemology, and ethics. He also works on Indian philosophy more broadly, ancient Greek philosophy, and continental philosophy, framing his research in the larger context of philosophy by fostering conversations between different philosophical traditions and texts.