The Lover of Wisdom I

Posted: Mon, Sep 15, 2025

Philosophía: “Love of wisdom.”

  • Love in Ancient Greece:
    • Erôs: Passionate love (think Sappho).
    • Agapé: Selfless, benevolent, unconditional love.
    • Philía: More “friendly” (by contemporary light), affectionate/non-passionate love.
  • Philosophy is delineated by way of two contrasts:
    • The philosophers are not ordinary folks.
    • The philosophers are not other intellectuals.
      • Not poets like Hesiod or Homer.
        • The philosophers are after naturalistic explanations of the world—i.e., those that do not involve the supernatural.
      • Plato: Also not sophists like Protagoras.
        • The sophists were professional public speakers who traveled to teach wisdom.
        • According to Plato, whereas a philosopher like Socrates is seriously interested in seeking the truth, sophists merely rely on rhetoric (“sophistry”) and please the crowd.
      • So, quite ironically, not everyone who loves wisdom counts as a philosopher!
    • Note that there isn’t a contrast between philosophy and what we today think of as science (e.g., Parmenides on pregnancy/sex, B17–18).

“Presocratic philosophers”: Philosophers prior to Socrates.

  • Not really a time thing: Many of the presocratic philosophers and Socrates were contemporaries.
    • Note the implication: Socrates is used here as a special reference point; the subtext is that [Western!] philosophy really began with Socrates.
  • The presocratic philosophers didn’t (and couldn’t) quite identify as philosophers, even though what they did has come to be recognized as philosophical.
    • They were predecessors to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in a distinct lineage.
    • Their questions, concerns, and methods were inherited by S/P/A and have come to define the Western philosophical tradition.

An illustrative example: Heraclitus’ logos

Starting point:

  • The world is ordered: There is a naturalistic/non-supernatural principle (“first principle”) that governs, drives, and explains the world.
  • This principle is intelligible: It’s feasible, even if difficult, to know it through human reason.

Two closely connected meanings of logos:

  • The explanatory/organizing principle of the world.
  • Reason, including its product—rational explanation.

Cf. Parmenides’ goddess (fr. 2):

But come now, I will tell you—and you, when you have heard the story, bring it safely away—
which are the only routes of inquiry that are for thinking:
the one, that is and that it is not possible for it not to be,
is the path of Persuasion (for it attends upon Truth),
the other, that it is not and that it is right that it not be,
this indeed I declare to you to be a path entirely unable to be investigated:
For neither can you know what is not (for it is not to be accomplished)
nor can you declare it.

Among the presocratics, the first principle is characteristically identified as an originating point—i.e., the stuff/matter out of which everything originated.

  • Heraclitus: Fire.
  • Thales (predating Heraclitus’ logos talk): Water.
  • Anaximander (also predating Heraclitus): Apeiron.
    • “[The first principle] is neither water nor any of the other things called elements, but some other nature which is apeiron, out of which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in them” (12A9 + 12B1).
    • “He declares that what arose from the eternal and is productive of [or, ‘capable of giving birth to’] hot and cold was separated off at the coming to be of this kosmos, and a kind of sphere of flame from this grew around the dark mist about the earth like bark about a tree. When it was broken off and enclosed in certain circles, the sun, moon, and stars came to be” (12A10).

Another illustrative example: Sappho of Lesbos

  • Entry in Witting & Zerg’s Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary.
    • Both “sapphic” and “lesbian” allude to Sappho.
  • Not generally recognized as a lesbian until quite recently.
    • Patriarchy took my girl: Fr. 31.
    • Too gay to function: Fr. 94.
  • Not generally recognized as a philosopher.
    • Sappho is clearly interested in wisdom, but:
      • She reflects on love/eros (a full-body experience vs. a mere feeling), desire, longing (“yearn”), memory, change, sorrow, family, [women’s] beauty …
      • She loves wisdom in an affective (cf. rational—but be careful about drawing a sharp line) way: A focus on the sensual, the bodily, the romantic, the erotic.
    • Does this still make her a philosopher? Who gets to decide this? What’s at stake?
  • “I say someone in another time will remember us” (fr. 147).

In-class activity: Which of the fragments we read for today made you think the most? Tell me something about it!