Crossing the Stream, Leaving the Cave: Budhist-Platonic Philosophical Inquiries, edited by our very own Prof. Pierre-Julien Harter and Amber D. Carpenter, has been published through Oxford University Press and is available now for purchase.

Crossing the Stream, Leaving the Cave brings philosophers from two of the world's greatest 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 mututal 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 anout 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 they put these arguments to. Bringing Platonic and the Buddhist perspectives jointly to bear creates a cosmopolitan philosophical exchange which yields greater conceptual clairty 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.