When his high school physics teacher veered from the problem at hand to offer a few insights on Platonism, Michael Hannen was so tantalized by the topic that he plunged forthwith into the depths of a scholarly rabbit hole and thereby discovered his life’s work.

“One day our physics teacher went off on a long digression that was basically Plato’s Allegory of the Cave,” said Hannen, program coordinator for humanities and philosophy at Amarillo College. “I’d refer to it as metaphysics today, but at the time I just thought it was the wildest thing I’d ever heard.