This paper attempts to present, both historically and analytically, the way philosophy had been exercised and developed in Modern Greece from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century in connection with its culture and history. It aims to introduce the reader to Neohellenic philosophy and its distinctive characteristics, and to acquaint her with the endeavours of many outstanding Greek intellectuals to continue the Hellenic philosophical and cultural tradition, going back to Greek Antiquity that had (...) been transmitted through the Byzantine learning, while, at the same time, to incorporate into their thinking Western philosophical traditions. My exegesis starts from the fifteenth century, when the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, and the Greek intellectuals went into exile in the West. Dealing with issues of educational reforms and with philosophical and linguistic controversies (seventeenth–nineteenth centuries), I shall examine, systematically and selectively, the Western influences that made possible the revival of traditional philosophy in Greek thought as well as the renewal of Greek cultural identity that led to the Greek War of Independence (1821–1827) and into the modern period of Greek history and intellectual thought. (shrink)

The article examines the development of anthropological discourse in British travel accounts of modern Greece, and the Greek response. The study has several aims. First, it argues that in British travel accounts ethnographic remarks are encountered which point to a genealogy of the British discipline of anthropology. These remarks on the modern Greek character formulated problÈmatiquesin which history and ethnography, as well as Romanticism and Enlightenment ideas, merged. Second, the article examines Greek peasantreaction to British observation and ‘intrusion’, as a (...) rational product of the Anglo-Greek exchange. Third, it maintains that such peasant responses, which are in accordance with counter-hegemonic, Neohellenic ‘high-brow’ attitudes, were notthe product of the latter, but their genealogical counterpart. From this it follows that in British encounters with Greek peasants, historians can trace the development of Greek folklore as a nationalist product which defied European hegemonic narratives of modern Greek identity. (shrink)

‘Neokantianism and Platonism’ indicates an important issue of Neo-Hellenic Philosophy during the 1920s and the 1930s. The protagonist was Johannes Theodorakopoulos. His Heidelberg dissertation Platons Dialektik des Seins (1927) follows the Neokantian theories of judgement (of Emil Lask and Heinrich Rickert) and explores Plato’s theory of judgement with emphasis on Philebos’ categories of peras and apeiron. Theodorakopoulos’ prolegomena to the Greek translation (1929) of Paul Natorp’s Platos Ideenlehre are relevant here. Nevertheless, Theodorakopoulos developed a personal interpretation of Plato’s philosophy and (...) almost demoted the Neokantian interpretation, as is clear in his Introduction to Plato (1941, in Greek) as also in his Heidelberg Vorlesungen 1969 entitled Die Hauptprobleme der Platonischen Philosophie. Besides, other interpretations of Plato came forward. Evangelos Papanoutsos wrote his Tübingen dissertation Das religiöse Erlebnis bei Platon (1926) under the supervision of Adickes. Konstantinos Georgoules, an earlier student of Husserl and Heidegger, published a translation of Plato’s Politeia (1939, in Greek) with a rather philological introduction.The Marxist Demetres Glenos, an opponent of Neokantianism, proposed a realistic interpretation of Plato’s Sophistes (1939, in Greek). Basileios Tatakes (an adherent of Henri Bergson) presented Plato’s philosophy as a reconciliation of reason and mysticism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The chief contribution of P. Kitromilides’ Enlightenment and Revolution is that it reconstructs the Modern Greek Enlightenment as a radical programme of social and political transformation. At the same time, it describes the petering out of the Enlightenment legacy in the newly independent Kingdom, whose public life was gradually infused with a romantic nationalism with mystical and religious overtones. During the twentieth century, this led to the decoupling of the Greek public mind from the idea of Europe, which had (...) been the lodestar for the leaders of the eighteenth century Greek Enlightenment and the Revolution of 1821. The writers of the ‘Generation of the Thirties’ constructed a notion of ‘Neohellenism’ in conscious disjunction from the ‘rationalist’ legacy of the West. Still, the institutional legacy of the Enlightenment survives as the foundation of Modern Greek public life, and its resilience was successfully tested against the onslaught of the ‘politics of unreason’ in the teens of the present century. (shrink)

En este ensayo se reflexiona sobre el sentido de la interpretación nietzscheana de Grecia, que aunque problemática y filosófica, se inserta en la tradición clasicista de Occidente. Ubicando el clima intelectual en el que surgió El nacimiento de la tragedia, se postula que el pensador alemán no puede..