It was with great sadness that we learned last week that Achilles Yiangoulli had died. His joyful contributions to the life of the Academy will always be remembered.
| Gorgias: Persuasion, Power & Passion starts Tues 10 Feb | Plato’s Myths starts Thurs 12 Feb | Plato is famous for his philosophical dialogues, but embedded in the discussions are these marvelous stories. Last year we decided to ran a course Read more
Our new offering for FOPA will not be quite so raucous as last year’s adapted of the Symposium.
Platonism has always been on the fringes of state-sponsored higher education. Ever since the universities were established in the Middle Ages, they have been dominated by Aristotelians, even Epicureans. The great Platonic awakenings during the Middle Ages, and in the Renaissance, both arose outside the universities and against strong resistance from within them.
It couldn’t have been any other way. If the spiritual authority of the state church were to be protected, then science must have no “theology.” Its orientation must be fully atheistic, just as academic science remains to this day.
We Platonists have always been out in the cold. Only, now with our participation in the Festival Of Para-Academia (FOPA) we find good company on the fringes. This year, the festival’s blurb grimly observes that the universities are now “little more than credentialing factories with branding strategies.” It continues:
