Reviving the Ancients
Plato’s Academy Centre aims to make ancient philosophy accessible and easily digestible to the public.
The Plato’s Academy Centre project is featured in the latest issue (Fall 2022) of the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR). SSIR is an award-winning print and digital magazine publication, and website, covering cross-sector solutions to global problems. It was launched by the Center for Social Innovation (CSI) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and currently published at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS). It’s aimed at social change leaders from around the globe, and online it reaches an estimated 2.5 million visitors per annum. So we’re very pleased with the publicity this brings to our nonprofit startup in Greece!
The article, titled Reviving the Ancients, was written by journalist Aisha Malik. She interviewed Donald Robertson, our president, and Justin Stead, from our board of advisors.
For centuries, Greece was the cornerstone of Western philosophy. To walk where philosophy originated, to walk in the footsteps of Plato and Socrates is to imagine how this tradition began.
Donald Robertson, president of Plato’s Academy Centre
“The center’s mission”, Malik writes, “is to make ancient philosophy—from the Socratic method to Plato’s dialogues that illustrate the method in practice—accessible and easily digestible to the public.”
The intention, says the center’s communications director, Kasey Robertson, is “to bring international business to Greece and build up an area that could use some development.” She says that the nonprofit will add jobs to the economy by employing local youth to assist with event programming.
The center receives funding from the Aurelius Foundation, an organization that shares similar goals about the preservation of philosophical integrity and the pursuit of knowledge. “We are partnering and supporting the Plato Academy project, as this initiative fits squarely into our mission,” says Justin Stead, who launched the foundation in 2019 to promote Stoicism. “We are looking to increase the awareness and application of Stoicism within younger generations,” he says, including CEOs and business leaders who could apply Stoic principles to “the development of their strategic plans, tactical executions, and cultural/teamwork initiatives.”
This is great publicity for our project. Donald previously wrote a feature on Stoicism and mentioned the Plato’s Academy Centre project in the 2021 edition of Governance Matters, published by the Chandler Institute. This new article goes into more detail about Plato’s Academy Centre and, we hope, will introduce our nonprofit’s work to a wider international audience.
Please check out the full article online, Reviving the Ancients, and help us spread the word by sharing the link on social media.
