Lecture

Why the Universities Will Never Teach Platonism

| FOPA 2025 | 12-14 Dec 2025 | Balam Balam Place, Brunswick | PAM presentation at 5pm Friday |

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:

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By Bernie Lewin, ago

The Medieval Astronomical Manuscripts Viewing is Booked Out

| Astronomical Manuscripts Viewing | State Library of Victoria | 5.30pm, 27 Nov | BOOKED OUT |

During the Signifying Nothing Timewell Lecture back in July, we highlighted a 13th Century manuscript of Ptolemy’s Almagest. In the first place, this manuscript is remarkable for the different types of numerals it uses, including different numerals for nothing (i.e., zeros). It is also remarkable for the philosophical attitude to empirical science that is expressed in the introduction, in the translations, and in the surrounding marginalia.

Most extraordinary of all, this 800-year-old manuscript somehow found its way south to the colony of Victoria, and so today it remains at the State Library of Victoria!

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By Bernie Lewin, ago