Venue is the Idle Valley Visitor Centre.

Contact Nick Pal using the link above.

Meeting on a weekly basis, the group started by looking at Plato and Aristotle, including reading one of Plato’s dialogues; the Meno, in which a slave boy appears to have knowledge of mathematics! Plato was trying to show that some knowledge is innate in all humans, but the questioning in this piece gives rise to some mathematical thinking in the boy, a process which today we generally call education. Here Plato’s particular argument does not hold water, but even now psychologists and philosophers still debate how much of our knowledge is innate and how much we learn through our experiences.

We take the weekly topics roughly in chronological order, from Plato to the present day. In Spring 2023, having caught up with the present, we will be going back the the Ancient Greeks and starting all over again.