What is philosophy? This has been a contentious question for as long as the subject has existed. And how long is that? That too is far from obvious, even if we confine ourselves just to the Western tradition. The Greek thinkers standardly viewed as the first Western philosophers did not call themselves “philosophers”; it was largely through Aristotle’s retrospective view of them as having done something recognizably similar to what he himself did—under the heading of philosophy—that they came to occupy this position. But that then leads to a series of further questions. Where did the term “philosophy”—or rather, the Greek term philosophia—come from; to whom was it originally applied, and why; and how did it get to be the name of a discipline that we still consider ourselves to practice today, and also consider to have been practiced, in varying forms (and not, of course, under that...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
