Academy Of Athens Research Articles

ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΙΑ. Yearbook of the Research Center for Greek Philosophy of the Academy of Athens (review)

ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΙΑ. Yearbook of the Research Center for Greek Philosophy of the Academy of Athens (review)

Renaissance Influences and Religious Reforms in Russia: Western and Post-Byzantine Impacts on Culture and Education (16th-17th Centuries)

It is perhaps axiomatic that we cherish more stereotypes about a society and its history the more distant from our own it seems to be. Russia is not so remote from the Euro-American tradition that its experience has been totally different from our own, and yet it has long been held to hover between the and the West (whatever they are) with a lingering ambiguity we seem unable to resolve. Chief among the stereotypes perpetuated about Russian history is that Russia persisted in a medieval isolation until Peter the Great Westernized it at the beginning of the eighteenth century. But this convenient truth, as transmitted by our general textbooks and our survey courses, is a gross oversimplification. The present book provides one of the most striking demonstrations of just how unreliable this oversimplification really is. Professor Medlin of the University of Michigan faculty is best known for his book, Moscow and East Rome (1952); Mr. Patrinelis, an archivist at the Academy of Athens, has published on post-Byzantine Greece and on intercultural relations between the Greek and Russian world. Together they have assembled a remarkable range of material that is not elsewhere presented in such a compact synthesis. What they offer is a picture of Russia's cultural dilemma during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Russia is to be understood here not only as the Muscovite Czardom alone but also the Ukraine, Ruthenia, and various related Slavic areas that were not a part of the Muscovite realm proper at this time but looked to Moscow for some degree of Orthodox leadership or support. The dilemma of these regions lay in their need to chart a course between the essentially backward-looking world of Greek Orthodoxy (i.e., the formerly Byzantine world by then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire) and the essentially forward-looking world of the Latin West. Caught between these two poles and recognizing that they were thus caught Russians faced a complex of decisions. To what extent were they to be guided by Greeks in purging from their religious life regional variants of their own that diverged from the wider Orthodox tradition? To what extent should they accept guidance and new ideas or institutional forms from either Protestant or Roman Catholic centers in the West? To what extent could they refine their own sense of mission and identity without

The Folklore Archive of the Athens Academy

The Folklore Archive of the Athens Academy

The Death and Burial of Vesalius, and, Incidentally, of Cicero

IT is generally believed that Vesalius died on his return from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.t ship carrying him was wrecked off Zacynthos (Zante), one of the Ionian islands close to the NW coast of Peloponnesos.' details of the shipwreck and of his death are unknown. This has teased me for a long time, and I decided last spring to write to my old friend and colleague, Professor Michael Stephanides of the University of Athens, to inquire whether more detailed information might not be available in one or the other of the learned journals of Greece. Prof. Stephanides is well known to the readers of Isis because of his history of science published in Greek (Athens 1914; Isis 3, 430-33), of his article La terminologie des anciens (Isis 7, 468-77, I925), and of many papers listed from time to time in our Critical Bibliographies. He kindly answered in a long letter which reached me in Naples on 23 July 1953, as I was preparing to sail; I thus read it just before crossing the Ionian Sea on my way to Athens. Prof. Stephanides drew my attention to a Greek paper by Nicolas Ant. Varvianis: The place in Zante where Vesalius died and was buried, published in the Practica, that is, the Proceedings of the Academy of Athens (synedria of 3 April 1952; vol. 27, 193-96, Athens I952).2 Varvianis' article puts together much information available in Greek and Latin. What follows is derived from it with various additions of my own; for the sources, Greek and Latin, quoted by the author, I must refer the reader to the original paper.

The Art of Teaching: A Practical Project in Geometry

Perhaps one effect of our Pre-induction courses of recent years will be the restoration of mathematics to its rightful place in the school curriculum. In the decade before the War we certainly swung to the far extreme from the spirit of Plato who, more than 2000 years ago founded his Academy in Athens and over the door placed this challenge, “Let None Ignorant of Geometry Enter Here.”

A New Method of Resolving a Racemic Compound

WE have recently developed a new method of resolving a racemic compound by selective adsorption, and the results we have obtained, already published in the Praktika of the Academy of Athens (April 1938), agree in the main with similar experiments of G. M. Henderson and Dr. H. Gordon Rule1.