Joachim Aufderheide shared his Buddhist-Platonist work on the trope of dreaming in Plato and Vasubandhu at the Centre for Philosophy and Art's conference on Wakeful Consciousness. This conference will be hosted at King's College London, 14-15 June 2022.
Taking as his starting point the "Orphic" gold tablets found in ancient Greek graves, which helped the deceased cross over to the afterlife, Alexis Pinchard investigates Gnostic and Vedic eschatology in this talk. Pinchard shows how the tablets' fundamental question - "Who are you?" - one of identity - invites us to seek the divine nature of our interiority.
Buddhist and Platonic ethics share a perspective which sets them apart from familiar moral theories, including the 'virtue ethics' inspired by ancient Greek. For Plato as for the Indian Buddhists, our primary moral task is to transform ourselves radically—and for each the primary mechanism for doing so is knowing reality. Moreover, unlike Aristotle, this knowledge which transforms us not, in the first instance, knowledge of what to do, but rather knowledge of impersonal reality. Orienting ourselves towards knowing an impersonal reality reconfigures our orientation away from the human world, enabling both Buddhism and Platonism to offer radical critique of our ordinary lives and everyday measures of good and bad--although the particular critiques offered may differ.
The thirteen members of the Buddhist-Platonist team presented their papers at "Buddhist-Platonism: An International Online Workshop." In addition to our usual fruitful group dialogue, we had the privilege of welcoming to each presentation an invited guest, who contributed generously to our discussions. We also benefited from having members of the public observe proceedings.