The Pari Center

Escaping the Cave
2026-11-26 17:00 - 2026-11-27 19:00 (Europe/Rome) | Cambridge, United Kingdom
Escaping the Cave:Plato in Science, Art and Spirituality

26–27 November 2026

Location: Cambrige, UK

Keynote: Professor Angie Hobbs FRSAWith Dr. Jonathan Allday, Professor Paul Bishop, Mark Vernon

Conference Chair: Professor Alison Liebling

A free public lecture followed by an intimate one-day conference exploring the continuing relevance of Plato’s thought to science, philosophy, art, spirituality and contemporary life.

Jointly sponsored by the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge and the Pari Center.

Choose How You Would Like to Attend

Thursday, 26 November

17:00 Public Lecture with Professor Angie Hobbs — FREE

Flourishing, Character and Justice: Why Plato Matters Now

Attendance is free, but advance registration is required.

Please book a FREE ticket to reserve your place at the lecture.

Following the lecture, there will be:

18:30–19:15 Drinks Reception

19:30 Optional Group Dinner at a Local Restaurant

If you would like to join us for dinner, please indicate this when reserving your free ticket below so that we can include you in the restaurant booking.

Dinner and drinks on November 26 are not included. Each guest will order and pay for their own food and drinks directly at the restaurant.

[RESERVE YOUR FREE TICKET – NOVEMBER 26]

Friday, 27 November

Escaping the Cave — One-Day Conference

€330 per person

The conference is limited to 22 participants, creating an intimate setting for presentations, discussion and conversation with the speakers.

Your £280 ticket includes:

Full-day conference attendance on November 27

Arrival coffee

Mid-morning coffee

Lunch

Afternoon coffee

Evening arrival drinks at Trinity Hall

Dinner at Trinity Hall

All of the above is included in your £280 conference ticket.

Places are limited to 22 participants and advance booking is essential.

[BOOK YOUR CONFERENCE TICKET – £280]

Plato’s metaphor of the cave, an underground vault where back-lit humans observe life’s goings on as a play of shadows on a wall, has long held a fascination for thinkers. It suggests that the world we experience in our day-to-day business is not all that there is. Rather it arises from structures that are less substantial to our senses, but equally real, existing in a layer of reality beneath the commonplace. Philosophically, the mainstream has moved away from Neo-Platonism, but suggestions from quantum mechanics, mathematics and other aspects of science, along with the philosophy of mind and some modern thinking on aesthetics, ethics and morality, suggest that Plato’s ideas are worth revisiting.

This two-day event features a keynote presentation by Professor Angie Hobbs FRSA, with the title: ‘Flourishing, Character and Justice: Why Plato Matters Now’ on day one, followed by a single-day conference with other speakers as well as delegate discussions on the relevance of Plato’s thought to modern times. The second day will be limited to 22 attendees and will finish with dinner at a Cambridge college. Lunch will also be provided during the day.

Programme

26th November

17:00 Public Lecture and Keynote Presentation: Professor Angie Hobbs FRSA

To be held at: The Institute of Criminology, Sidgwick Avenue room B3/4

Flourishing, Character and Justice: Why Plato Matters Now

What might it mean to live a flourishing life? And what is the relationship between flourishing and the virtues, especially justice? In this talk based on her recent book, Professor Angie Hobbs explores how Plato can help us with these urgent questions, and how he addresses the key issue of character formation, and why it never benefits us to return wrong for wrong. She shows how she has used his methodology, ideas and arguments in a variety of sectors to address contemporary issues in education, faith–secular debate, health care and the civil service, and invites the audience to discuss with her what further lessons can be applied. We are living in fast-moving and uncertain times and need ancient wisdom more than ever. Plato really does matter, right now!

Why Plato Matters Now (Bloomsbury 2025). angiehobbs.com

18:30 – 19:15 Drinks Reception

20:00 Dinner at local restaurant

By prior arrangement, attendees to pay for their own meals and drinks

27th NovemberConference Escaping the Cave

To be held at: The Institute of Criminology, Sidgwick Avenue Boardroom

Dress code: (for dinner in Trinity Hall)

Ladies: smart casual — relaxed tailoring, smart separates or a day dress

Gentlemen: smart casual — blazer, flannels and an open-collared shirt; no tie required

09:30 Arrival and coffee

10:00 Welcome and introductions

10:30 Presentation 1 Dr Jonathan Allday: A Realistic Approach to Quantum Reality

The case for an objectively real layer of potential reality

Followed by discussion

11:30 Mid-morning coffee

11:50 Presentation 2Prof. Paul Bishop: Plato and Politics in the Classroom

Reflections on the experience of using the “Socratic method” to teach political thought.

Followed by discussion

13:00 Lunch

14:00 Presentation 3: Dr Mark Vernon: Perceiving The Eternal: Plato’s Ideas, Blake’s Vision

Followed by discussion

15:10 Afternoon Coffee

15:30 Pannel discussion with audience Q&A

17:00 Closing

19:00 for 19:30: Dinner Trinity Hall, with arrival drinks

Inscendence: A Participatory Enquiry into Awareness, Presence and Place
2027-05-31 17:00 - 2027-06-07 14:00 | Pari, Italy
Inscendence: A Participatory Enquiry into Awareness, Presence and Place

May 31 – June 7, 2027

Speakers: Jonathan Code and Alistair Duncan

Location: Pari, Italy

Ticket Prices:

Private AccommodationPrice: 1800.00 euros

Shared Accommodation – Private Room with shared bathroomPrice: 1650.00 euros

which includes:

a 7-night stay;

breakfast, lunch and dinner at the local restaurant featuring locally sourced produce and traditional dishes;

water, wine, and coffee are provided with lunch and dinner;

programmed lectures, activities and materials

There is a limited amount of accommodation in Pari and you will be placed on a first-come, first-served basis. We will also be using accommodation just outside of the village—within 3 kilometres. If you are housed outside Pari, a shuttle to and from the village will be provided.

Event: The event starts with dinner on Monday May 31 at 17:00 and ends after lunch on Monday June 7.

Download information, terms and conditions for this course.

About the Event

Why Inscendence?

In a time riven by fragmentation, dislocation and conflicting narratives, this programme invites a collaborative enquiry into ways of knowing and thinking that will delve deeply into the field where land, body and consciousness meet.

Inscendence proposes an opportunity for re-orientation by attending to participative awareness, heightened sensory perception and the wisdom of the body-mind.

In resonance with Pari, its landscape, history, and community, we will engage with many of the Center’s core themes seeking to open up a creative ground from which new forms of insight, relationship and action can emerge.

Inscendence—the impulse not to rise above the world but to climb into it, to seek its core.Thomas Berry, via Robert Macfarlane

Programme Themes and Practices

Over the course of a week in Pari, we will engage with:

Embodied and Perceptual Investigation:

Explorations into how breath-work, movement and posture can expand and transform perceptual awareness

Working with our experience of the traditional elements of nature: earth, water, fire, air and ether in a contemporary way

Heightening the sensitivity of our physical senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, as entry points into deeper experience

Understanding the body-mind as a phenomenological instrument

Fieldwork in the More-than-Human World:

Immersive sessions engaging with the plants, stones, weather and landforms of the Tuscany landscape

Exploration of a range of ways of knowing including Goethean observation and nature-connection practices

Attending to artefacts, stories and built structures as relational presences

Creative and Collaboratives Explorations:

Creative writing, journaling, and drawing as practices of attending to lived experience

Sitting in Council / dialogue will allow us to share insights and integrate personal experience into collective understanding.

Conversational ‘tutorial-style’ sessions will be used to explore the intersection between experience and theory

Daily Rhythms—each day will include four main elements:

Outdoor sessions exploring a range of practices and experiences

The seeding of ‘micro-practices’ that will provide the opportunity for moments in the day to become an opportunity for conscious awareness

Sitting in Council, ‘tutorial’ circles and creative sessions to collectively reflect on our unfolding experience and its implications

Personal reflection time supported by the quiet rhythms of the village

Theoretical Context:

With an emphasis on experiential forms of enquiry, Inscendence is nevertheless inspired by the insights and practices of a wide range of thinkers from both East and West. These perspectives provide lenses through which our lived experience can be shared and articulated.

Some of these sources of inspiration include:

The Implicate / Explicate / Holoflux (David Bohm)

The implications of brain hemisphere modes of attention (Iain McGilchrist)

The nature of participatory consciousness (Owen Barfield,)

The idea of Authentic Wholeness (Henri Bortoft, J.W. Goethe)

The unity of Mind and Matter from (Gregory Bateson)

The explorations of language, sensory perception and the new animism (David Abram, Robin Kimmerer)

Philosophical Taoism

Non-dual Shaiva Tantra

What May Emerge:

A refined capacity for attentional flexibility and resonance

A deeper sense of participation in the implicate wholeness of the cosmos

Insight into how perception constructs (and reconstructs) the world

A felt understanding of new grounds for coherent action and relationship

A more integrated experience of self within the context of a conscious whole.

Our aim is not to provide answers to the complex challenges of our time but to cultivate a new ground of exploration—a place from which thought, relationship and creativity may unfold with greater coherence and sensitivity.

Participating in an event at the Pari Center is more than joining a program, it is entering an experience unlike any other. This is no ordinary conference in a city hotel, nor a retreat hidden within a bustling resort. Instead, it is an invitation to step into an unspoilt medieval village in the Tuscan hills, where time slows and life unfolds at a rhythm that allows you to think, feel, and reconnect.

At the Pari Center, learning becomes a way of being. David Peat often described Pari as an alchemical vessel—a transformative space designed for reflection, renewal, and personal growth. It is a rare and welcoming environment for anyone seeking something deeper.

You will share traditional Tuscan meals and conversation with presenters and fellow participants, taste local wines, mingle with the village’s tiny community, and take in the beauty of the surrounding countryside. All of this unfolds within a gentle way of life, far removed from the hurry of work and the noise of city living.

The Pari Center gathers world-renowned thinkers, scholars, and innovators from diverse disciplines and traditions. Our mission is to explore the mysteries woven into everyday life: the subtle, essential questions that shape who we are and who we are becoming. Through rigorous inquiry, creative dialogue and participatory activities, we aim to illuminate the origins, nature, and possibilities of human experience.

We invite you to discover why so many visitors regard the Pari Center not only as a place of learning, but as a place of personal transformation.

Please contact Eleanor if you would like more information about this event at: eleanor@paricenter.com

Jonathan Code

During a childhood and youth spent in Southern Ontario, regular immersion in and on the freshwater lakes of Frontenac Park fostered in me a deep ecological and place-based awareness of the natural world. I am to this day never more at home than in a canoe on a lake at dawn, paddling out as the sun rises and the loons call forth the day.

My ecological interests grew and deepened through encounters with the work of Goethe, Schumacher, Vine Deloria Jr., and Steiner—whose contributions to education, medicine, human development, and agriculture (Biodynamic farming) continue to inform my teaching, research, and writing to this day.

I am particularly interested in the contribution that Goethe can make to ecological thinking (which I addressed in a study of Goethe’s method of exact imagination as applied to the Showy Milkweed (Asclepias speciosa)) and in how the Biodynamic preparations are not only stimulants for good composting processes but are also catalysts for a deepening of agricultural consciousness (which I address in Muck and Mind: Encountering Biodynamic Agriculture, 2014).

I am currently engaged in a study of traditional fire-craft and its affordances for educational philosophy and praxis. This study grows out of a deep concern for education in the twenty first century (see Crafting: Transforming Materials and the Maker, 2019)—a concern that what is too often left out in many of our educational endeavors is a sense for who a human being is…and what we can (potentially) become.

Alistair Duncan

After a first career as a systems programmer, architect and programme manager in technology for a couple of global corporations, fifteen years ago I jumped ship. Since then I have worked as an eco-psychologist, workshop facilitator/educator and therapist across a number of contexts particularly in universities, disadvantaged communities and with conservation organisations.

My passion is weaving together concrete practices from contemporary psychology, embodiment modalities and therapies as well as the spiritualities of east and west. Then, using them to make experiential and practical, the insights that arise from a range of fields across philosophy, science and spirituality.

To define my context with a few names. I would cite David Bohm, Owen Barfield, Martin Heidegger, Gregory Bateson, Henri Bortoff, Michael Washburn, David Abram and Kenneth White as my current key co-ordinates. And I am drawing practices from a wide palette, but the core is found in indigenous tracking methods, Non-dual Shaiva Tantrism, Taoism, and Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP).

I have a first degree in Biology and a Masters in Philosophy, and have trained in several coaching and therapeutic modalities.

Everything I do nowadays is based in nature. It’s my current conviction that exploring a deeper sensorial resonance and reciprocity between the human body-mind and the more-than-human cosmos is the starting point for a lived experience of wholeness and a connection into the deep consciousness of the cosmos. And that, from there, we may be able to discern a better way to live in these times.

Information

Terms and conditions (PDF)

Additional Information about the Pari Center (PDF)
