THE SCIENTIFIC CULTURE IN EIGHTEENTH TO NINETEENTH CENTURY GREEK SPEAKING COMMUNITIES: EXPERIMENTS AND TEXTBOOKS

Constantine Skordoulis, Gianna Katsiampoura and Efthymios Nicolaidis

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THE SCIENTIFIC CULTURE IN EIGHTEENTH TO NINETEENTH CENTURY GREEK SPEAKING COMMUNITIES: EXPERIMENTS AND TEXTBOOKS
Constantine Skordoulis, Gianna Katsiampoura and Efthymios Nicolaidis
ABSTRACT
The scope of this paper is to describe how the Greek scholars of the late
eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries related to the political and intellectual
developments in Europe during the Enlightenment through scientific instruments
and experimental physics. We review the organization of Greek education
during the Ottoman domination, focusing on the secondary schools and the
scholars who introduced the experimental methodology in the late eighteenth
century. In our analysis, the role of the scholar–teacher and his textbook are central
to the adaptation and appropriation of the new scientific culture based on experiments
and the experimental method. Furthermore, our analysis of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century Greek physics textbooks focuses on what
we term ‘iconic experiments’ (experiments performed by famous European scientists),
since they constitute one of the main channels through which European experimental
tradition was transferred to the Greek speaking regions. Throughout
this paper, the teaching of the new science of ‘Newtonianism’ is associated with
the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and is considered to
have paved the way for the liberation of the Greek population from the Ottoman
Empire.
INTRODUCTION
Scientific instruments in modern Greece appeared in the late seventeenth century
when Chrysanthos Notaras (1663–1731) built some basic astronomical instruments,
including a quadrant astrolabe (for his life and work, see Stathi, 1999).
This type of astrolabe was a cheaper version of the classic astrolabe and was well
known to the Ottomans. It originated from the Arabs and the first person who introduced
it to the West was Profatius Tibbon (1236–1305), a Jew from Provence;
thus the name given to the instrument was ‘astrolabe of Profatius’. Notaras’ instruments
are the first for which there was profound evidence and they were preserved
even around the 1930s, but since then they have been missing. Around
1700, Notaras purchased some survey instruments during his educational trips to
4 Constantine Skordoulis, Gianna Katsiampoura, Efthymios Nicolaidis
Italy and France, as one might infer from his book Introduction to Geographie
and Sphere (1716). Later, he also purchased telescopes for the entertainment of
the Greek princes of the Romanian provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
These instruments along with a few others that were available in the Greek
area in the eighteenth century were exceptions in an educational landscape where
experiment and observation were absent. The Byzantine tradition did not favour
the acquisition of scientific instruments. Byzantine mathematical sciences supported
the learning of complex calculations, but disregarded experiments and observations
in favour of formal reasoning. The University of Padua, the main seat
of study for Greeks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, resisted the advent
of the new physics and hence the experiment before the establishment of the
Teatro di filosofia sperimentale by Giovanni Poleni in 1739 (Vlahakis, 1998).
During the late eighteenth century, and especially the years after the French
Revolution and the changes that took place in the Greek speaking communities of
the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, experimental physics made its way
into Greek secondary schools (Henderson, 1971). There were experimental laboratories
in the schools of Ioannina, Milies, Chios, Smyrna, Kydonies, Constantinople,
Bucharest, and Jassy. The articles of the teachers in the journal Hermes the
Scholar and travellers’ reports give evidence for the scientific instruments and
laboratories. Very few of these instruments have survived, such as those of two
partisans of modern Greek Enlightenment, Anthimos Gazis and Theophilos
Kairis. Gazis sent instruments to teach physics and geography to the school of
Milies from Vienna, and Kairis purchased a telescope during his stay in Paris in
1810 (Vlahakis, 1999). These instruments were used mainly for qualitative
demonstration experiments and were intertwined with a certain ideology: the introduction
of the new science as a product of the Enlightenment. In this framework,
experiments were performed both for the students and the public. Their
purpose, apart from teaching, was to impress the audience so it could recognise
the importance of science, which was considered in enlightened Europe as the
champion of all human activities.
The scope of this paper is to describe the following relation: how the Greek
scholars of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries related to the
political and intellectual developments in Europe of the Enlightenment through
scientific instruments and experimental physics. Our research is situated within a
wider research area examining the reception of scientific ideas from countries of
the European scientific centre to countries of the European scientific periphery
(see on that theme, Blay and Nicolaïdis, 2001; Skordoulis, 2009).
To examine issues of reception requires discussing the ways in which ideas
and methods that originate in a specific cultural and historical context are introduced
into a different context, with different intellectual traditions and educational
institutions (see Dialetis, Gavroglu and Patiniotis, 1999; Mendoza, Nicolaïdis, and
Vandersmissen, 1999). In this respect, examining the role of the scholar-teacher is
crucial. The scholars of the periphery were not simply disseminating ideas and
methods acquired from the centres of Europe, but they acted upon them and
adapted them to the local setting. The role of the scholar-teacher and his textbook
Scientific Culture in Greek Speaking Communities: Experiments and Textbooks 5
were central to the adaptation and appropriation of the new scientific culture. The
‘experiment’ and the new experimental method was the most important constituent
of this culture.
What we argue in this paper is that the introduction of the new mode of scientific
thinking based on experiment was a necessary precondition for the connection
of the national aspirations of the Greek middle classes with the Enlightenment
project, and that the teaching of the new science of ‘Newtonianism’ became
a political action associated with the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution, and was thought of as paving the way for the coming national liberation.
Our paper gives a general outline of the introduction of the experimental
method in Greece, and of the physics textbooks published during the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by Greek scholars for citizens living in
what is now mainland Greece and among the Greek speaking communities in
what was then the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires.
The paper is organised as follows: in the first section, we describe the sociohistorical
context for appreciation better understanding of the opposition to the
new experimental method and its political and educational function. In the second
section, we give an account of the educational institutions in mainland Greece and
among the diaspora (the Greek communities that were founded in western Europe
by the Byzantines after the Ottoman conquest, for example, in Venice, and later
by Greek merchants who fled the Ottoman empire, for example, in Vienna, Trieste,
Odessa, etc.) where the new experimental method was introduced in physics
instruction, and also of the teachers who introduced the new curricula. We discuss
the didactical use of the experiments and its importance in educating the population
in a new way of thinking, paving the way for the course of national liberation
that was to follow. In the third section, we classify the published physics textbooks
and analyse the experiments described in five of the most widely used textbooks
published in the period between 1766 and 1812 in Vienna, Leipzig, and
Venice. Our analysis is based on a thematic classification of the experiments described
therein, with emphasis on what we term ‘iconic experiments’ (that is,
experiments performed by scientists that were already famous in the period of
interest)