Textbooks at the Crossroads: Scientific and Philosophical Textbooks in 18th Century Greek Education

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Greek society of the eighteenth century did not have the institutional or theoretical background for the development of an original interest in scientific pursuits. The contact with the new scientific ideas aimed basically at the assimilation of these ideas in the body of the existing contemplative philosophy and the context where such undertaking took place was exclusively education. At the same time, education was the field where the political and ideological pursuits of various social groups intersected. A quasi modernistic profile of the educational activity was especially favored by a new generation of scholars who wished to assert their distinctive intellectual physiognomy, as well as by the emergent group of merchants who strove to establish their distinctive cultural and political authority. As a result, the new interest in the sciences reflects the confluence of the aims of these two social groups. The study of scientific textbooks, which were produced under these circumstances, depicts the consequences of this confluence and brings to light some important aspects of the social and intellectual environment within which the contact of Greek intellectual life with modern sciences occurred.