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2023
MLE Friends Talk with Amber Carpenter
“Care and Knowledge: Buddhist-Murdochian Challenges to Making the Impersonal Interpersonal”
Buddhists and Platonists share a broadly similar ethical outlook in centring ethical life on transformation through knowledge of impersonal reality, and these areas of overlap are shared with Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy. Where Buddhists and Platonists part ways is in the metaphysics (the reality to be known) and epistemology (what knowing it consists in). While retaining a Platonic metaphysics, Murdoch’s epistemology is distinctly Buddhist. This means she shares with the Buddhists challenges brought by Plato to the elevation of perception-like, private, experiential knowledge to the status of highest epistemo-ethical attainment. This talk explores how and whether the interpersonal can be brought back into an epistemological project centred on personal experience; and it investigates the different sorts of care associated with such practice, and how they are related to projects of knowing reality in Murdoch and in Buddhist ethics.
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Amber Carpenter (Yale-NUS College) has published widely in ancient Greek philosophy, and Indian Buddhist philosophy, both separately and jointly—most recently leading an international research project on Buddhist-Platonist philosophical inquiries (buddhistplatonistdialogues.com). Topically, she pursues questions in metaphysics, epistemology and mind, as they connect to ethical questions. She collaborated with Rachael Wiseman on the Integrity Project (integrityproject.org; Portraits of Integrity 2020); and has held research fellowships at Yale, Melbourne and York, and with the Einstein Forum (Potsdam) and the Templeton Religious Trust (‘Ethical Ambitions and Their Formations of Character’, part of the Moral Beacon project).
19-10-2023 07:30 PM