‘Philosophy’ comes from philo-sophia not from philo-theoria. It means ‘love of wisdom’ not ‘love of theory’. Philosophy is about living wisely, that is well. Although theory can make an important contribution to living wisely, philosophy is not about theory for theory’s sake. Theory is a means not an end. The ancient Greeks understood this as did the Hellenistic and Roman philosophers – the Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics, Cynics, Neo-Platonists, and so on. Theory was important but only to the extent it was relevant to the art of living. In the Middle Ages, however, the question of how to live well became the exclusive province of religion, and so philosophy was reduced to scholastic logic-chopping by monks. The ‘analytic’ tradition inherited the scholastic conception of philosophy whereas nineteenth-century German and twentieth-century French philosophers returned, in the main, to the original idea of philo-sophia. I was never interested in theory for theory’s sake though it took me some time to realise this.

Julian Young Carolinian

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