ACADEMY

Greek Academeia, Latin Academia, in ancient Greece, the academy, or college, of philosophy in the northwestern outskirts of Athens, where Plato acquired property about 387 BC and used to teach. At the site there had been an olive grove, park, and gymnasium sacred to the legendary Attic hero Academus (or Hecademus). The designation academy, as a school of philosophy, is usually applied not to Plato's immediate circle but to his successors down to the Roman Cicero's time (106-43 BC). Legally, the school was a corporate body organized for worship of the Muses, the scholarch (or headmaster) being elected for life by a majority vote of the members. Most scholars infer, mainly from Plato's writings, that instruction originally included mathematics, dialectics, natural science, and preparation for statesmanship. The Academy continued until AD 529, when the emperor Justinian closed it, together with the other pagan schools. The Academy philosophically underwent various phases, arbitrarily classified as follows: (1) the Old Academy, under Plato and his immediate successors as scholarchs, when the philosophic thought there was moral, speculative, and dogmatic, (2) the Middle Academy, begun by Arcesilaus (316/315-c. 241 BC), who introduced a nondogmatic skepticism, and (3) the New Academy, founded by Carneades (2nd century BC), which ended with the scholarch Antiochus of Ascalon (d. 68 BC), who effected a return to the dogmatism of the Old Academy. Thereafter, the Academy was a centre of Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism until it was closed in the 6th century AD. a society of learned individuals organized to advance art, science, literature, music, or some other cultural or intellectual area of endeavour. From its original reference in Greek to the philosophical school of Plato, the word has come to refer much more generally to an institution of learning or a group of learned persons. At the close of the Middle Ages, academies began to be formed in Italy, first for the study of classical and then of Italian literature. One of the earliest was the Platonic Academy, founded in Florence in 1442 by two Greek scholars with the encouragement of Cosimo de' Medici. Literary academies sprang up throughout Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries; the most famous of these was the Crusca Academy, founded in Florence by A.F. Grazzini in 1582. The French Academy, which would become Europe's best-known literary academy, began in 1635. The Royal Spanish Academy was founded in 1713 to preserve the Spanish language, and it published a landmark Spanish dictionary for that purpose. Academies of science began to appear in the 16th century, and academies of fine arts, music, social sciences, medicine, mining, and agriculture were formed from the 18th century on. Most European countries now have at least one academy or learned society that is sponsored by or otherwise connected with the state. The influence of the academies was greatest during the 17th and 18th centuries but declined during the 19th because of their tendency to resist new and unorthodox developments in science and culture. The United States, like Great Britain, Canada, and other English-speaking countries, has no state-established academies of science or literature, a fact reflective of English beliefs that culture should basically be a matter for private initiative. The first learned society in what would become the United States was founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743 and was called the American Philosophical Society. The rival American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1779, and the National Academy of Sciences was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1863.