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

158 PHOENIX Calling Philosophers Names: On the Origins of a Discipline. By Christopher Moore. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2020. Pp. 411. Moore offers nothing less than a new approach to the early history of philosophy in ancient Greece. Instead of asking what the first philosophers did that qualified them as philosophers (e.g., “What makes Thales a philosopher?”), Moore asks what the term philosophos meant and to whom it was applied (“Why would someone name Thales philosophos?”). Diverging from the standard approach,1 Moore provides an innovative perspective on the complex question of the beginnings of Greek philosophy. His focus on the early meaning of the term “philosopher” leads him to Pythagoras, and with that he takes up Walter Burkert’s 1960 article “Platon oder Pythagoras? Zum Ursprung des Wortes ‘Philosophie’.”2 Burkert argues that philosophos originally did not describe someone who loves (yet lacks) wisdom, but—coined in late fifth-century Athens—someone who is familiar and at home with wisdom. Moore, working meticulously through all the extant passages (up to the fourth century b.c.e.) that contain philosoph-words, reaches a different, but more convincing conclusion: the term originally meant, somewhat negatively, “sage-wannabe” (1 and passim), describing someone whom others see as trying hard to belong to the category of sophoi. Moore furthermore suggests that the first to bear this name were people associated with Pythagoras. The book comprises ten chapters which, apart from the introduction, are grouped into three major sections (“Origins,” “Development,” and “Academy”), followed by an epilogue. The introduction (Chapter One) provides a helpful overview of the book and introduces the story of how Pythagoras, when asked about his profession, was the first to call himself a philosophos. The oldest named witness of this story is the Academic Heraclides Ponticus, and its historical value has often been denied, including by Burkert, but Moore sets out to reveal that it is more than an Academic fabrication. Chapters Two to Four focus on the origins of the term philosophos. Chapter Two looks at its earliest attestation in Heraclitus B35 DK: “philosophical men really quite ought to be researchers into much.” Moore defends, with new force, the sometimes doubted ascription to Heraclitus and shows that philosophos has a negative connotation here. Moreover, Heraclitus may specifically have Pythagoras in mind (as supported by B129). Chapter Three asks what philosophos could have originally meant. Moore analyzes the term as a typical phil-prefixed word and tracks the meaning of soph- at the estimated time of coinage at about 500 b.c.e. Taking up Burkert’s contention that the phil-prefix did not mean “striving for x which one lacks,” but rather “being familiar with x,” Moore digs deeper and finds a more specific function of the prefix. Phil-names are mostly not selfdescriptions , but other-applied epithets; have a negative connotation; and characterize an excessive behavior. For instance, philoptolemos describes irascible people with a proclivity for war; whether they like or desire war is not at stake (86). The second use of philwords is to mark a conventional social practice as being conducted in a way that goes beyond the accepted norms. Moore tracks the meaning of sophos from the archaic period 1 A well-worked-out recent example of the standard approach is M. M. Sassi, The Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece (Princeton 2018); cf. A. Laks, The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy (Princeton 2018). 2 Hermes 88 (1960) 159–177. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 159 (“excellent at a specific skill”) to the sixth century (“sage”) and the beginning of the fifth century when sophos was someone who gave “exceptional practical advice” to politicians or private citizens. Initially philosophos was used, Moore argues, as a derisive term that described young men who strove actively to become or to be considered sophos. In Chapter Four, Moore asks who those students were and suggests that they may have been Pythagoreans. This has important implications for Heraclides’ story and its possible historical nucleus. Our evidence for Pythagoras is admittedly circumstantial. What Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Empedocles say about Pythagoras is compatible with the idea that he was called philosophos in the sense of “sage-wannabe,” even though at least...

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