Who has invented the word philosophia?

By: | Post date: 2017-03-19 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

The word is all over the place in Plato and his contemporaries and it’s not in Homer. Philosophy – Wikipedia guesses that Pythagoras probably came up with it first.

The basis for that guess, from what I can tell, is that as cited in LSJ (s.v. φιλόσοφος), both Cicero (Tusc. 5.3.9) and Diogenes Laertes (prooem 12) report that Pythagoras called himself a philosophos “lover of wisdom”, and not just a sophos “wise man, scholar”. That implies to me that this terminology was an innovation by Pythagoras. Pythagoras was certainly early enough in the philosophical tradition for that to make sense.

Leave a Reply

  • Subscribe to Blog via Email

    Join 324 other subscribers

  • June 2023
    M T W T F S S
    « Nov    
     1234
    567891011
    12131415161718
    19202122232425
    2627282930  
%d bloggers like this: