Why philosophers called lovers of wisdom

The importance of having the answers is ultimately less than the importance of the way in which one arrives at them. If wisdom were only about the answers then, if there were gurus of the sort described above, they could simply make everyone else wise by dispensing the answers.

But wisdom, I submit, resides rather in the ability to ask and understand the questions, effectively seek the answers, and competently judge for oneself which potential answers pass muster.

If this sounds familiar, it is because it requires the ideal of autonomy that I wrote about last time. The pursuit of wisdom, I believe, is, in large measure, the pursuit of autonomous rationality.

It is to be found less in the answers themselves then in the way one goes about seeking the answers. This is also why we can maintain that people like Plato and Aristotle were extremely wise even when we no longer accept so many of the answers they arrived at. Their wisdom resided in the way they approached the questions, utilizing their own powers of reasoning in unprecedented ways.

Approaching wisdom in this way also gives us a handle on what it could be to love it. Just what love is becomes a philosophical question in its own right. And that is certainly a love worth pursuing. By Enoch Lambert. There are elements of truth to the image of the guru. Health Professions. Law School. He studied botany and zoology, geography and meteorological phenomena, ethics and politics, rhetoric and what he called Poetics, where he delved in theater.

If we recall the golden age of comedy and tragedy during the glorious 5th century BC, and the impact these performing arts had with audiences, it will be easy to understand the importance of Aristotelian thought; when he addresses characters in tragedy, in reality he is producing an x-ray of the human soul.

An interesting fact about Aristotle is that Alexander the Great was his disciple, and it was through him that Aristotelian thought, sciences and wisdom, reached as many territories as he conquered. If we analyze what we learn nowadays in school, we would come to realize that all of it originates from, or is related to, the Greeks: Arithmetics, Mathematics, Geometry and Music are concepts developed by Pythagoras.

Grammar, History, Biology and Architecture also find their inception in Hellenic thought. The terms themselves are Greek as well. The love of wisdom. Plato believed that before the soul entered in our body, we have innate knowledge of what is ultimate truth but when we enter in the material world we forgot this knowledge. Knowledge must be grounded in some sort of rational insight. Reference this. Introductory remarks The term philosophy comes from two Greek words, philos, which means friend or lover, and sophia, which means wisdom.

Philosophy is that quest. With the rise of Christianity, the philosophical way of life was adopted by its theology. A philosopher is never correct, for the term itself is relative in nature, yet is always complex.

Socrates declined to accept any fees for his teaching from students and because of his denial for material success; many pupils were greatly influenced by his teachings.

He believed that our lives and society should be base on universal knowledge. Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger have two very contrasting views on the topic. And what does it mean to love wisdom? And these sensory knowledge is again relative for the perceiver which is different from others opinion. Although never directly penned by Socrates' as a theory or treatise, our understanding of his philosophies as they relate to wisdom derives from Plato's writings on the subject.

Some philosophers are more practical, focusing more on what we do. Notably, Diotima calls Love a "lover of wisdom" which in Greek means literally a philosopher Benjamin Jowett, trans. Study for free with our range of university lectures! To answer theses questions you first have to know what philosophy is.