End of Summer Salon: Plato's Pathway to Transcendence

Turning the Eye of the Soul from the inside out | Fabio Bucci | Bookings Essential |

Turning the Eye of the Soul from the inside out : Plato's Pathway to Transcendence

Presenter: Fabio Bucci

When Plato asks for “gently drawing the eye of the soul, buried in some barbaric quagmire” he means to extricate us from the illusion of conventional reality where we have run aground. And yes, he wants us to devote our entire life to this practice, the only one that would enable us to witness the ultimate reality. Indeed, if Plato often mentions the limits of words, the limits of the expressible and the limits of cognition, it is because he nonetheless remains primarily the philosopher of the transcendence of these limits.

To that end, he advocates giving dialectic the power to ensure “immortality” to the "seed" that grows discourse "in the character of others", discourse that transmits a science “from within” and "capable of helping itself as well as the man who planted it".

And when Plato reminds us to be aware of our conscious experience and its constituent mental and physical factors, it is to better guide us on the practice to be followed in order to escape the prison that they constitute. In this talk, we will chart what Plato means by “the activity”, the necessary practical knowledge immersed in introspection that would enable an "awakened state".

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Fabio Bucci is an Australian-French independent researcher in philosophy and history with a background in fine arts and architecture. One of his latest research topics is a comparative study of Plato and Indian philosophy.

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The image used for this promotion is a memento mori mosaic with Greek Delphi maxim, gnōthi sauton (know thyself), from the Convent of San Gregorio, Rome.