| FOPA 2025 | 12-14 Dec 2025 | Balam Balam Place, Brunswick | PAM presentation at 5pm Friday |
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:
“Managerial logic, economic austerity, and the hollowing out of intellectual life have produced a kind of institutional auto-pilot: grey infrastructure for a world that no longer believes in anything, and values even less.”
Oh dear! that does sound rather grim.
In our talk (5pm Fri 12 Dec), we explain how the orientation of the science practiced at Plato original Academy is in the opposite direction to that of the modern academy because Plato’s mystical ground is right where Christian dogmatic theology used to be. But, while explaining this, we also welcome others to the increasingly crowded fringes with the news that …
… its not so bad!
The air is fresh, the horizons are broad, and there’s no need for all that grey infrastructure.
No need for those greying yellow sandstones either.
See you at FOPA!
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