Papers by Kostas Tampakis
“Like another St Basil”: Astronomy, Orthodox Apologetics and Anticommunism in Twentieth-Century Greece
The Historical Review/La Revue Historique, 2025
This article investigates the ideological instrumentalisation of astronomy within twentieth-centu... more This article investigates the ideological instrumentalisation of astronomy within twentieth-century Greece, centring on the work of Dimitrios Kotsakis (1909–1986) and, secondarily, Stavros Plakidis (1893–1991). The study demonstrates how Greek astronomers functioned as active agents, reframing scientific practice to serve specific apologetic and political agendas. By recontextualising pre-existing antimaterialist discourses, these figures perpetuated an ideological struggle against materialism and socialism that long predated the geopolitical Cold War, but which contributed to it. Ultimately, the article argues that Kotsakis and his milieu successfully synthesised disparate intellectual fields – scientific, religious and political – to wage what was essentially a Cold War anticommunist crusade, yet one deeply rooted in a distinctively Greek context.
Being Orthodox, Greek and modern Scientists and theologians in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Greece
Jaume Navarro, Kostas Tampakis, Science, Religion and Nationalism Local Perceptions and Global Historiographies, Routledge, 2023
Science and religion scholarship often involves Darwin; let us also begin with such a story. The ... more Science and religion scholarship often involves Darwin; let us also begin with such a story. The timing of the appearance of the article is interesting in itself. From 1876 onwards, Darwinian evolution, interpreted through Haeckelian lenses, had started to arrive to Greece, via French and German scholarship. Following the seven-year-long military campaign that was the 1821 Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, Greece was recognized as a state by the London Protocol of 1828. In the Ottoman Empire, there were large Greek-speaking and Orthodox Christian populations, and many found themselves within the borders of the Greek state in 1832. The Greek Orthodox Church and Orthodox Christianity in general was a second source of national identity. The consolidation of Greek nationalism and of Hellenism was not a linear or quick process.
Introduction. Science, religion and nationalism, or the entanglement of mythical narratives
Jaume Navarro, Kostas Tampakis, Science, Religion and Nationalism Local Perceptions and Global Historiographies, 2023
n 1822, the government of Buenos Aires, one of the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata, approved ... more n 1822, the government of Buenos Aires, one of the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata, approved a law of Ecclesiastical Reform, aimed at the control of the Church by the emerging new, independent state. The Convent of Santo Domingo was one such ambitious project. The curating of the museum and the practical lectures in the laboratories were assigned to two Italian exiles who had taken part in the liberal revolt in Piedmont in 1821 to oust Vittorio Emanuele I: the pharmacist Carlo G. Ferraris and the young medical doctor Pietro Carta Molino. Nations are communities, spaces where specific cultures arise, but also the hallowed keepers of continuity and of past, present or future homelands. National and nonnational forms of identification, acting as forms of collective identity, force us to consider the role of communities of knowledge as analogous to nations.
Darwin's dragons -150 years of Greek Orthodox apologetics and the challenge of Darwinism
Mike Brownnutt and Keith R. Fox, Global Perspectives on Science and Christianity, Langham Publishing, 2024
Βλαχάκης, Γ. (επ) Ιχνεύσεις στην Ιστορία & τη Φιλοσοφία της Επιστήμης, Ένωση Ελλήνων Φυσικών, 2022, Τόμος Α, σ. 147-173, 2022
In the last two decades or so, there have been several vigorous discussions on 'decentering the p... more In the last two decades or so, there have been several vigorous discussions on 'decentering the picture' in History of Science, both spatially and temporally 1. Themes like the circulation of knowledge, the communicative practices within science and recently the possibility of a global historiography of science are being reproblematized 2. This has led to a lot of novel research being carried out, for example, on scientific practice in 19 th century India, on Meiji Japan and on Late Ottoman Beirut 3. However, there is also the tendency, especially when focusing on the period after the mid 18C, for Europe to be implicitly treated as a coherent, unified space, whose cultural and geographical borders were the same. In order to sidestep the historiographical hegemony of this thing called European science, it is tacitly assumed that we better focus our gaze west of the Atlantic or east of Caucasus.
Η Χημεία στην Ελλάδα και το Γερμανικό Παράδειγμα (1860-1904)
Αλέξανδρος-Ανδρέας Κύρτσης και Μίλτος Πεχλιβάνος (επιμ.), Επιτομή των ελληνογερμανικών διασταυρώσεων, 04.05.2021, 2021
Review of Y. Antoniou, The Greek Engineers: Institutions and Ideas, 1900-1940, Athens: Vivliorama, (Γιάννης Αντωνίου, Οι Έλληνες Μηχανικοί: Θεσμοί και ιδέες, 1900-1940, Αθήνα: Βιβλιόραμα)
Almagest, 2010
Review of I. Katsaloulis, The Prediction of Earthquakes in Greece: Science, politics and public sphere, Athens: Ropi,
Almagest, 2022
Vlahakis, G. Tampakis, K. Science and Literature: Imagination, Medicine and Time, 2021
Science and Literature: Poetry and Prose, 2021
POETRY undiscovered" (i.e. a new form of poetry) and the access to a new spiritual ideal. Words a... more POETRY undiscovered" (i.e. a new form of poetry) and the access to a new spiritual ideal. Words alluding to navigation (like "magnet", "sextant") are frequent in Leaves of Grass, such as in "Passage to India", where he writes: The plans, the voyages again, the expeditions; Again Vasco de Gama sails forth, Again, the knowledge gained, the mariner's compass" (s. 4, l. 75-80, 414). Like Amerigo Vespucci, Columbus, or Vasco de Gama and the various naturalists, astronomers, entomologists, geologists etc. who accompanied the great explorers-the poet's task, is to observe the world, to collect as much information as he can, and to draw all sorts of maps: geographical, topographical, geological, botanical, zoological, but also maps of the populations, historical maps, memory maps, in order to give us a global vision of the earth and of his own imaginary space.
Science, Religion, and the Creation of Historiographical Categories
Handbook for the Historiography of Science, 2023
This chapter first explores the constitutive role that science and religion historiographies play... more This chapter first explores the constitutive role that science and religion historiographies played for the establishment of the history of science as a discipline, in general, and the parallel and codepended introduction of the first major theories on the relations of science and religion. The second part discusses more recent proposals on the historiography of science and religion, from the “complexity thesis” attributed, to John H. Brooke, to Peter Harrison’s work on Protestantism, secularism, and the historicity of the concepts themselves. Finally, the third part argues that the historiography of science and religion should continue to play a constitutive part in history of science, by proposing and integrating novel historical lines of inquiry. To that end, a historiography that would tackle science, religion, and the state is tentatively described.
The Narses project International Conference ‘Science and Religion’: Day 1
This paper describes the design and the formative evaluation of educational software concerning t... more This paper describes the design and the formative evaluation of educational software concerning the ‘Depletion of the Ozone Layer’ designed for the students of the Faculty of Primary Education (pre-service teachers) of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. The selection of the topic was based on: i) environmental criteria (importance of the phenomenon, complexity of the phenomenon), ii) societal criteria (local interest, human activities effects), iii) pedagogical criteria (students’ misconceptions about the phenomenon, potential for interdisciplinary teaching, absence of educational material about the phenomenon), and iv) technological criteria (difficulties in performing hands-on experiments for ozone depletion in the laboratory, visualization prospects). Using the software, students can investigate through simulation experiments and other activities, the following processes: ozone formation, the beneficial role of the stratospheric ozone layer, the ozone depletion p...
Two Worlds Apart -Comparing Greek and American 19th Century Science Education
In this paper, I intend to describe an example where the study of science education in two specif... more In this paper, I intend to describe an example where the study of science education in two specific national contexts can illuminate the formation and character of the respective scientific communities. Thus, I will try to compare the educational structures and institutions created in nineteenth century US and Greece and show how they interacted with scientific practice in each case. At first glance, these two social and political formations had almost nothing in common. USA was a huge but fragmented state, with abundant natural resources and clear ties with a European superpower. On the other hand, Greece was a devastated small country, emerging after four hundred years of Ottoman rule and struggling to modernize under heavy European influence and interference. Despite their many differences, I aim to show how both American and Greek science education drew aspirations from the same European pedagogical models and how this process contributed to the character of scientific practice ...
Presentation of Narses results: Science and religion in the Greek state (19th-20th c.)
During the last years, computers have found their way into Greek secondary education. At the same... more During the last years, computers have found their way into Greek secondary education. At the same time, environmental education has also received special attention in both primary and secondary education, due in part to the cross-disciplinary curriculum introduced. This paper presents a web based course on ‘Renewable Energy sources’, created through the ELearn platform, for the use of students in Technical Vocational Educational Secondary Education Schools (TVE).The course presented in this paper is part of a larger project, commissioned by the Greek Manpower Employment Organization to supplement specific aspects of the curriculum taught at TVE with web based courses. The course consists of five autonomous chapters, selected from the relevant textbook taught in TVE. The first covers general principles and concepts relevant to renewable energy sources, while the second focuses on solar energy and its applications. The third presents hydraulic and wind energy, the fourth geothermal en...
Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences, 2010
Introduction: The many faces of scientific textbooks Textbooks have a dubious role in the histori... more Introduction: The many faces of scientific textbooks Textbooks have a dubious role in the historiography of science. At first glance, the number of treatises and papers on Newton's Principia or on Mendeleev's Principles of Chemistry testify to the existence of a well established subject of study. Once, however, we move away from research on such monumental works, a curious silence prevails. Very few historical studies have been devoted to science education textbooks or to the role they played in the formation of modern science (Kohlstedt 2005, Bensaude-Vincent 2006). The intention of this paper is to show how the examination of science textbooks can lead to some interesting and original conclusions, especially when social, economical and scientific formations in the 'periphery' of scientific production are considered 1. By describing the typology of creation and publication of textbooks used in science education in the early Greek State, we aim to show that textbooks can act as both valuable mediators between the historiography of science and the historiography of education, as well as signifiers of the complex interplay between the social, political and ideological framework of each case and the scientific practice taking place within it. The very concept of the scientific textbook is a somewhat recent arrival. It acquired its present status as "a book used in the study of a subject as one containing a presentation of the principles of a subject or as a literary work relevant to the study of a subject" 2 only during the last decades of the 18 th century (Brock 1975, Patiniotis 2006). As far as philosophy of science is concerned, a textbook is the 'last existential act' of the scientific community and thus the least interesting of its practices (Brooke 2000) 3. Going back to the writings of Auguste Comte, for example, the scientific textbook shifts from representing the historical to describing the dogmatic order of science, as science mature (Comte 1830). On the other side of the positivistic fence, Gaston Bachelard describes the creation of the textbook as an effect of the 'epistemological rupture' between the pro-and meta-scientific era of a discipline (Bachelard 1938). Even T. S Kuhn's locus classicus, The Structure of Scientific 1 The concept of the 'center' versus the 'periphery' has come under some well deserved scrutiny in recent historiography of science (Gavroglou 2003, Patiniotis 2006). Here, it is used to denote cultural and scientific spaces which did not have a noticeable effect in the formation of the canonical scientific theories of the 18 th and 19 th century. The Greek speaking, mostly Orthodox communities in the Ottoman Empire or abroad were, in this strict sense, in the periphery. Considerations on a methodology of historiographical textbook research Research on the role of science textbooks seems, thus, to call for a more detailed examination of methodological assumptions usually taken at face value. The first such assumption is the dichotomy between 'science in action' and 'textbook science', a differentiation stemming from the traditional view of textbooks. In scientific spaces similar to the early Greek State, where a scientific community, with all its accompanying practices, did not exist in the classical sense, but where science textbooks were nevertheless published, these two images of science become blurred. Science education comes to the forefront as a candidate for the defining action of the scientific community. As a result, it must be considered an open question whether the unnamed, everyday scientific textbook helps formulate the practice of the scientific community and not the other way around. Secondly, the two overlapping definitions of a science textbook, that of a 'book used in teaching science ' in contrast to a 'book intended for use in teaching science'
Η εκπαίδευση των δασκάλων και διδασκαλισσών στις φυσικές επιστήμες (1831-1950)
Συμπεράσματα: Η εργασία αυτή ήταν μια προσπάθεια να τεκμηριωθεί, να μελετηθεί και ουσιαστικά να ε... more Συμπεράσματα: Η εργασία αυτή ήταν μια προσπάθεια να τεκμηριωθεί, να μελετηθεί και ουσιαστικά να εξηγηθεί η πορεία των Φυσικών Επιστημών στον ελλαδικό χώρο και ειδικότερα στην εκπαίδευση, από την εποχή της ίδρυσης του νέου ελληνικού κράτους, το 1824, μέχρι και έναν περίπου αιώνα αργότερα, το 1932. Το θεωρητικό πλαίσιο που χρησιμοποιήθηκε ως εργαλείο έρευνας επέβαλε τον θεματικό καταμερισμό της παρούσας μελέτης σε αυτάρκεις αλλά όχι και αυτόνομες μονάδες ανάλυσης. Είναι όμως αναγκαίο να συνθέσουμε τις μέχρι τώρα μερικές αναλύσεις σε ενιαίο πλέγμα, ώστε να φανούν και να υπογραμμισθούν τα κυριότερα αποτελέσματα της μελέτης και να αναγνωρισθούν οι παράγοντες που οδήγησαν ή επέτρεψαν την δημιουργία των φαινομένων που παρατηρήσαμε. Στο κεφάλαιο που ακολουθεί, θα ανατρέξουμε χρονικά την περίοδο της μελέτη μας, συνδέοντας τα διάφορα μερικά συμπεράσματα των κεφαλαίων σε ένα ενιαίο όλο. Η μελέτη μας ξεκινάει από την ίδρυση των Σχολείων της Αίγινας από τον Ι. Καποδίστρια, αλλά υπάρχουν στοιχεία...
Science Education and the Emergence of the Specialized Scientist in Nineteenth Century Greece
Science & Education, 2012
ABSTRACT In this paper, I describe the strong and reciprocal relations between the emergence of t... more ABSTRACT In this paper, I describe the strong and reciprocal relations between the emergence of the specialized expert in the natural sciences and the establishment of science education, in early Modern Greece. Accordingly, I show how science and public education interacted within the Greek state from its inception in the early 1830, to the first decade of the twentieth century, when the University of Athens established an autonomous Mathematics and Physics School. Several factors are taken into account, such as the negotiations of Western educational theories and practices within a local context, the discourses of the science savants of the University of Athens, the role of the influential Greek pedagogues of the era, the state as an agent which imposed restrictions or facilitated certain developments and finally the intellectual and cultural aspirations of the nation itself. Science education is shown to be of fundamental importance for Greek scientists. The inclusion of science within the school system preceded and promoted the appearance of a scientific community and the institution of science courses was instrumental for the emergence of the first trained Greek scientists. Thus, the conventional narrative that would have science appearing in the classrooms as an aftermath of the emergence of a scientific community is problematized.
Science & Education, 2006
In this work, our goal is to examine the attitude of the Greek scientific community towards Quant... more In this work, our goal is to examine the attitude of the Greek scientific community towards Quantum Mechanics and establish the history of teaching of this theory in Greece. We have examined Physics textbooks written by professors of the University of Athens, as well as records of public speeches, university yearbooks from 1923 to 1970, articles in popular scientific magazines, political and philosophical publications and lemmas of encyclopedias that were influencing the public at the time. Our research shows that Quantum Mechanics in Greece was involved in the debate between the political left and right and the church organizations of the period, leading to an extremely idealistic misinterpretation of the theory. As a result, Quantum Mechanics was late to establish itself in Greece, with the first structured and autonomous course on Quantum Mechanics appearing as late as 1962.
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Papers by Kostas Tampakis