Dimitris Timpilis

I am a mathematician, theatre director, playwright, educator, and philosopher of education. My work explores a single question: How do human communities learn to think together?

This question has led me through what might seem like disparate fields, such as mathematics, theatre, history and philosophy of science and technology, cognitive science, education, and democratic theory, but I have come to believe they are expressions of a single phenomenon. The same structure that makes a mathematical proof convincing makes a democratic assembly function, makes a theatrical performance transformative and educational, makes a scientific community self-correcting. It is the structure of dialogue: a claim, a challenge, and a witnessing community that adjudicates and decides.

The Greeks called this structure dialectics. I call it the technology of collective thought, as artificial and as powerful as writing or mathematics, requiring institutional cultivation to survive. When this technology works, it produces marvels: technology, science, philosophy, democratic governance, art that illuminates the human condition. When it fails, darkness returns.

Education

I hold a Ph.D. in STEM Education from the University of Miami, where my dissertation examined how Epic Theatre can deepen students' understanding of artificial intelligence and its societal implications. Now, I am working on what my research introduced and I coined Triadic Adjudicative Dialectics (TAD), a framework for structuring learning environments around the same triadic pattern that underlies democratic deliberation, scientific peer review, and Ancient Athenian Drama: proposer, challenger, and adjudicating community.

I also hold a Master's in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where I graduated as valedictorian, and a Bachelor's in Mathematics from the University of Patras, with a specialization in Mathematics Education, History, and Philosophy of Mathematics.

I have been teaching mathematics at the high school level, tutoring and mentoring students in Athens, Miami, and New York. As Head of the Mathematics Department at Archimedean Middle Conservatory, I led curriculum initiatives that improved mathematics proficiency rates from 68–78% to 83–96% during pandemic recovery. I taught theatre and mathematics at Archimedean Upper Conservatory for nine years, directing annual productions that integrated STEM concepts with dramatic arts, including research collaborations with the University of Miami on using theatre to teach the Nature of Science.

I currently teach doctoral courses in the Applied Learning Sciences Ed.D. online program at the University of Miami and during the summer of 2025 I served as site director for the Summer Science Program, a residential STEM program for gifted high school students. Through Magma Plural LLC, I am developing summer programs that treat mathematics as philosophy, examine it within its historical and social contexts, explore paradoxes, unsolved problems, and the deep connections between mathematical proof and democratic thought.

Philosophy

My theoretical work focuses on the thesis that human consciousness, knowledge, and civilizations evolve through social selection. A process analogous to natural selection, in which ideas compete within dialectical arenas and survive or die based on their capacity to withstand challenge before a witnessing community.

I am writing a book, On the Origin of Ideas by Means of Social Selection, that traces this process through several poleis across three millennia: From Athens and Alexandria to Baghdad, Florence, Vienna, New York, and Silicon Valley, examining how the Triadic Adjudicative Dialectics structure emerged, flourished, and or failed in different cultural contexts. The book concludes with a call for a metacognitive enlightenment with dialectical education at its core. The classroom is a crucible where students rotate through all roles of proposer, critic, and member of the witnessing and deciding community. It’s in this learning environment where the next generation learns to keep the fire of collective consciousness burning.

My blog, The Astoria Agora, extends these ideas into contemporary discussions of education, artificial intelligence, theatre, and democracy. Named for the ancient Greek marketplace where citizens gathered to exchange produce, art, and ideas, to discuss, debate, and decide, the Agora is my digital forum for exploring what it would mean to build a modern polis education; an education teaching democratic citizenship.

Theatre

I trained in theatre direction at the Experimental Stage of the National Theatre of Greece and in acting at the Contemporary Theatre of Athens Drama School. My teaching, directing, and acting credits span the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, the National Theatre of Greece, and the Patras Regional and Municipal Theatre, as well as alternative spaces in Athens and all major cities of Greece, but also in Miami and New York.

I have directed works by Aristophanes, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, George Orwell, Roberto Athayde, A.R. Gurney Jr., and contemporary Greek playwrights, including Makis Papadimitratos, Vangelis Alexandris, Elia Verganelaki, and Christos Strepkos. I served as assistant director and acting coach on feature films that received awards at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, including the FIPRESCI Award from the International Federation of Film Critics.

My current theatrical work centers on Magma, a sci-fi existential comedy I wrote that traps a human and a humanoid AI in an elevator, where small talk spirals into parasites, memes, free will, the boundaries between organic and artificial, and consciousness. The play breaks the fourth wall in its final movement, implicating the audience in the very process of meaning-making it describes. A short film adaptation, Liminal Space, extends these themes into cinema.

Comics

I worked professionally as a comics artist and illustrator from 1994 to 2010. Two comic series were published in 9, the supplement comics magazine in the Saturday edition of Eleftherotypia, a major Greek daily: Dog Tales, stories about the ancient Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, and “Apeiron” Hotel, inspired by paradoxes of infinity in mathematics, science, and philosophy.

I represented Greece in the comics category at the 9th Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean in Rome, and my work has appeared in twenty-six solo and group exhibitions across Greece, Italy, Serbia, and the Republic of North Macedonia. I continue to design posters and programs for my theatrical productions.

I am also an amateur wildlife photographer, and I spend much of my free time on the road, listening to the stories of everyone I meet.

The Thread

A mathematical proof is a demonstration: A dialogue with an imagined skeptic. A democratic assembly is a dialogue between citizens within a democratic community. A scientific paper is a dialogue within the scientific community. A theatrical performance is a dialogue between what happens on stage and the audience. Meaning emerges within the community. In the network of social interactions. Not in individual brains. Meaning emerges from the encounter between perspectives. From the structure of claim, challenge, and collective judgment.

The Greeks invented this structure. They called the place where it happened Polis. A polis is not just a city. It is a community that has learned to metabolize contradiction. That is practicing direct democracy. Civilizations that can metabolize contradiction survive. Civilizations that cannot, break.

This is what I work on. Education that focuses on democratic citizenship, philosophy that traces how human communities learned to think together, theatre that questions.

Thinking that continues the human dialogue through the ages.

The fire must be tended.