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I am Anthony K Nairn, Assistant Director of the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR), and welcome back to the ISSR YouTube channel and ISSR’s In Conversation series.
For many of us, the terms East and West, science and religion, carry meanings that we associate with specific things in the world. They point to something we intuitively understand, but any comparative analysis of these terms, whether across cultures, across time, across religions, or even across sciences, reveals a complex story that is interwoven with histories, ideologies, languages, cultures, and more. These complexities are not only important for those whose job is to produce scholarship on such topics, but also critical to know more generally, to understanding the complexity behind such seemingly well-known terms that are central to our experiences and orientations in the world, and the part they play in organizing us with respect to our place in the world.
For us here in the West, any confrontation with the East usually conjures images of, say, China, Korea, Japan, or India, but this is complicated by the connection to the institution of Orthodox Christianity, sometimes referred to as Eastern Orthodoxy. Greece is an interesting exemplar of this. Not only is it considered by many the birthplace of Western culture, but it is also part of the European Union. It is a place that many Europeans and North Americans view with a type of historical longing, and yet, as we'll hear today, Greece is a peculiar place with a rather complex historical entanglement between science and religion, history and culture, ideology and politics. Its place in history has long been central to the very notion of the West, yet its historical identity challenges any such claim.
My guest today is Kostas Tampakis, a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Historical Studies of the National Hellenic Research Foundation. He is a member of the Scientific Board of the European Society for the History of Science and President of the Greek National Commission of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology/Division of History of Science and Technology. His research interests include the history of the relations between science and Orthodox Christianity, the history of science and technology in the Greek-speaking world from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and the history of science education. His work has been published in Isis, The British Journal for the History of Science, and History of Science. Recent publications include “Science and Scientists in Modern Greece,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Greek History (Oxford University Press, 2026); Orthodox Christianity and the Study of Nature, co-edited with Ronald Numbers (Brepols, 2024); and Science, Religion and Nationalism: Local Perceptions and Global Historiographies, co-authored with Jaume Navarro (Routledge, 2023).
Dr Kostas Tampakis
https://www.eie.gr/en/human-resources/kostas-tampakis/
The book discussed in this episode is Orthodox Christianity and the Study of Nature: Histories of Interaction, edited by Kostas Tampakis and Ronald L. Numbers
https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503612461-1
And the article we discussed is “‘Like another St Basil’: Astronomy, Orthodox Apologetics and Anticommunism in Twentieth-Century Greece” by Kostas Tampakis, and is available open-source
https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/historicalReview/article/view/43838
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Anthony K Nairn
www.anthonyknairn.ca
ISSR Executive Assistant
www.issr.org.uk
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