Calling Philosophers Names: On the Origin of a Discipline by Christopher Moore

Abstract

Reviewed by: Calling Philosophers Names: On the Origin of a Discipline by Christopher Moore Jonathan Lavery MOORE, Christopher. Calling Philosophers Names: On the Origin of a Discipline. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020. xi + 411 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper $32.95 No later than 347 BCE people began calling Diogenes of Sinope a dog (kyōn). Apparently, he wasn't offended. For around 337/6 BCE, after the new Macedonian ruler announced himself as "Alexander the Great," he replied with equal ceremony: "And I am Diogenes the Cynic (kyōn)." Thus did an insult get refashioned as a self-description. By so claiming a word pinned on him by others, Diogenes helped braid together the peculiar self-sufficiency for which he was already known and the brand name he still exemplifies today. Name and nominata were brought together for abuse, stabilized by appropriation, and preserved in legend. Calling Philosophers Names tells a comparable—albeit richer and far more complex—story in which philosophoi and its cognates evolved from being the wry label for a group of eccentrics around 500 BCE into a nom de profession in the fourth century. It's a terrific story, which Moore constructs ingeniously and tells very well. Moore's primary task is to disentangle and reconstruct the complex, intertwined careers of now familiar words philosophia, philosophoi, and philosophos in one strand of ancient thought, and practices and personalities from the history of philosophy in another. Moore's novel approach is to trace the development of philosophia and its cognates by tracking the word-group from inchoate origins to designators for a mature discipline. It took several generations for loose strands of names and nominata to coordinate as we might expect. This enterprise was both lexical and normative. Indeed, Moore argues convincingly that the first element of phil-stem compounds originally entailed something negative, and only later acquired neutral and positive associations. For most of this period, the extension of philosophos did not include Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, and it was not until Aristotle that philosophia became a recognizable discipline. The result is a genealogy in which family membership was established partly by historical descent, partly by retrospective adoption. Calling Philosophers Names opens with an anecdote for which our earliest attestation is from Heraclides of Pontus, a fourth-century Academician and contemporary of Aristotle: On being asked by the tyrant Leon what he is, Pythagoras described himself as a philosophos, one who observes life and hunts after truth. What made this moment of self-identification believable to a fourth-century audience? For Moore, plausibility is one reason, but the fact that Leon required an explanation of the word philosophos is suggestive—evidently it was newly coined and not in wide circulation. Chapter 2, the first of three on "Origins," begins with a cluster of remarks from Heraclitus, among which is our earliest extant instance of a philosoph-construction. By Moore's account, Heraclitus's specification that philosophical men (philosophous andras) "ought to be researchers into much" (DK B35) is of a piece with other fragments criticizing polymathy, empirical inquiry, and Pythagoras (B40, B57, B129, B81). The label "philosophical men" in B35, Moore argues, picked out "sage-wannabees" [End Page 600] who mimic sophoi without being worthy of sage status. "Philosophical" did not signify admirable intellectual cultivation. Other scholars amend the fragment. Moore leaves everything as it is, reading it as a complaint about the polymathy of philosophical men (rather than an exhortation for readers to take up philosophia). Chapter 3 elucidates metalinguistic features of phil-stem words, using as a guide Aristotle's analysis of several examples (Nicomachean Ethics, books 1, 2, and 4). According to Moore, such words were not originally used by anyone to describe themselves; they were, rather, other-applied descriptions of someone whose behavior is excessive with respect to the object or activity designated by the second element. While a moderate pursuit of wealth is good, being philoploutos is avaricious. So, alongside veneration of the Seven Sophoi, there was derision for posers who aspired to that status, namely, philosophoi. In chapter 4, Moore conjectures that Pythagoreans were among those commonly and dismissively called philosophoi. Chapter 5 examines all six extant...