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.

Crossing the Stream, Leaving the Cave; Amber D. Carpenter and Pierre Julien Harter; Oxford University Press; Hardcover; 320 pages; $105.00

Charlotte Alston is Professor in History at Northumbria University, UK. She is the author of Russia's Greatest Enemy? Harold Williams and the Russian Revolutions (2007), Piip, Meierovics, Voldermaras: The Baltic States Makers of the Modern World (2010) and Tolstoy and his Disciples: The History of a Radical International Movement (2013). Amber Carpenter is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS, Singapore. Rachael Wiseman is Lecturer in Philosophy at University of Liverpool, UK.

Pierre-Julien Harter is the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Professor of Philosophy in Buddhist Studies at the University of New Mexico. His research focuses on the Buddhist concept of the path, especially in the exegetical Indian and Tibetan literature of the Abhisamayalamkara.