The death of Stelios Ramfos, one of the most recognizable and influential Greek philosophers and writers of his generation, was announced Monday, following a period of hospitalization at an Athens clinic, according to Greek media reports. He was 87.
Over a writing career that produced more than 30 books, Ramfos maintained a constant presence in Greek public life and left a significant mark on the country’s intellectual and political discourse.
Early life and education
Ramfos was born in Athens in 1939. He began studying law at the University of Athens but interrupted his studies in 1965 to pursue philosophy in Paris, at what was then the Université de Vincennes à Saint-Denis and is known today as Université Paris 8. He taught philosophy there from 1969 to 1974. In 1975 he returned to Greece for good, devoting himself to writing and to teaching at various institutions.
An evolving body of thought
Ramfos’s intellectual trajectory was marked by significant ideological shifts. As a young man he was active on the Greek left, joining the youth wing of EDA, a left wing party active before Greece’s 1967 to 1974 military dictatorship, and writing for the student publication Panspoudastiki, a connection he severed for good in 1963.
During his years of study in France, he came under the influence of Cornelius Castoriadis, the prominent Greek philosopher known for his writing on bureaucracy and social autonomy, and began engaging seriously with patristic thought, the writings of the early Christian church fathers, and with Orthodox Christianity more broadly.
After his return to Greece in the 1980s, Ramfos became associated with a current of thought known as neo-Orthodoxy, alongside thinkers such as Christos Yannaras and Zisimos Lorentzatos. The movement focused on the perceived cultural conflict between Eastern Orthodox tradition and the secular West. From the 1990s onward, however, he revised this position, adopting more modernizing views and coming to regard certain aspects of the traditional Greek mindset as an obstacle to the country’s progress rather than a source of strength. This ideological shift provoked the ire of many on the left, who ultimately portrayed him as an apologist for the status quo and the big institutional power structures.
A lasting public presence
Ramfos maintained an active media presence throughout his career, through television interviews, newspaper columns and frequent public lectures. In analyzing the roots of what is often called Greece’s kakodaimonia, a term commonly used to describe the country’s recurring political and social dysfunction, along with what he saw as collective failings in the national mindset, he exerted a lasting influence on Greek public opinion and on the country’s intellectual elites.
His bibliography reflects these intellectual pursuits, including his positions on Marxism, the universality of Greek culture, and the relationship between contemporary intellectual life and the Greek Orthodox tradition. Among his published studies are works on Plato , Aristotle, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, and the Desert Fathers, the Christian ascetics who withdrew into the Egyptian desert in the third and fourth centuries.
