Table Of ContentWisdom and Philosophy
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Wisdom and Philosophy
Contemporary and Comparative Approaches
Edited by
Hans-Georg Moeller and Andrew K. Whitehead
Bloomsbury Academic
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-4869-3
PB: 978-1-3500-4550-7
ePDF: 978-1-4742-4870-9
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wisdom and philosophy : contemporary and comparative approaches / edited by Hans-
Georg Moeller and Andrew Whitehead. -- 1 [edition].
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4742-4869-3 (hb) -- ISBN 978-1-4742-4868-6 (epub) -- ISBN 978-1-4742-4870-9
(epdf) 1. Philosophy, Comparative. 2. Wisdom. I. Moeller, Hans-Georg, 1964- editor.
B21.W57 2016
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2015030969
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
Introduction Andrew K. Whitehead and Hans-Georg Moeller vii
Part 1 Chinese Wisdom
1 The Wisdom of Charioteering (Yu 御): Old Practice, New Perspectives 3
Robin R. Wang
2 Lessons from Stupidity: Wisdom and the Man from Song 15
Jim Behuniak
3 The Wisdom of the Unsayable in the Chinese Tradition 25
Karl-Heinz Pohl
Part 2 Wisdom Compared
4 The Philosopher or the Sage? Apophaticism in Europe and China 55
William Franke
5 Wisdom as Knowledge and Wisdom as Action: Plato, Heidegger,
Cicero, and Confucius 75
Paul Allen Miller
6 Anonymous Sages: Wisdom and Fame in Greco-Sino Philosophy 93
Geir Sigurðsson
7 Seeking Wisdom with Aristotle and Zhu Xi 111
May Sim
8 Wisdom as Realization: Heidegger and Zhuangzi on Belonging in
the World 125
Steven Burik
Part 3 Contemporary Wisdom
9 Philosophy as a Spiritual Practice: An Old Idea Whose Time
has Come 149
Sean J. McGrath
vi Contents
10 Wise Questions 163
C. Wesley DeMarco
11 Future-Oriented Philosophy and Wisdom East and West 187
Martin Schönfeld
12 Conceptual Metaphors and the Goals of Philosophy 205
Victoria S. Harrison
Index 223
Introduction
Andrew K. Whitehead and Hans-Georg Moeller
One of the perennial questions philosophers have been asking themselves is
what it actually means to do philosophy. According to the ancient Greek term—
philosophia (φιλοσοφία)—philosophy is the “love of wisdom.” The ambiguity of
the phrase as rendered in English affords alternative meanings. The philosopher,
as the “lover of wisdom,” can be understood either as the object of wisdom’s
love, and therefore as fortunately blessed as wise, or as the subject who strives
towards, and desires, wisdom. But if, as the suspicion goes, those in love are
not necessarily in the best position to perceive accurately the object of their
affection, the question may be raised: has the actual nature of wisdom so
far evaded many philosophers? Particularly in the context of contemporary
academic philosophy, the association between philosophy and wisdom is,
arguably, more problematic than ever.
Already, we find one potential source for the divergences and antagonisms
among schools of thought concerning the meaning of philosophy in the Greek
conception of sophia (σοφία), which carries the alternative senses of “skill,”
“knowledge of,” “acquaintance with,” and even “sound judgment.” In fact, as is
shown throughout this volume, these different senses each serve as cornerstones
and guideposts for distinct contemporary philosophies.
Despite significant changes in meaning, over time, the term philosophy has
an unbroken history of several millennia and links not only the postmodernists
and analytic philosophers of our day with the Presocratics and Platonists of
ancient times but also Western with Eastern traditions which have now entered
the sphere of world philosophy. In contemporary academia, these links tend
to focus on the meaning of sophia as judgment or knowledge of: wisdom as
epistemology. This should not be surprising, if only in light of how wisdom—
and in turn the love of wisdom—is conceived in different languages.
The English term “wisdom” stems from the Old High German Wistuom,
combining (and thereby conflating) “wise” with the abstract suffix of state—
tuom (judgment). Philosophy is therefore—and rather appropriately in light
viii Wisdom and Philosophy
of the contemporary academic philosophical landscape—“the love of wise
judgments.” Curiously, before the term Philosophie was taken up, the traditional
German term for philosophy during the Enlightenment was Weltweisheit, which
translates as “wisdom of the world” or “world-wisdom.”
Those who nowadays search for a philosophy living up to the name of
“love of wisdom” tend to look specifically to “oriental” traditions to reconnect
the discipline with its “true” or “original” mandate. Trying to account for
this tendency requires caution, however, and a deliberate overlooking of
the treatment of “philosophy” in contemporary China and Japan. In the
mid-nineteenth century, the Japanese philosopher Nishi Amane coined the
neologism tetsugaku (哲學) to translate what he had encountered as philosophy
in the academic institutions of the West. While the term was originally left
untranslated and merely transliterated as hirosohi (ヒロソヒ), Nishi’s move
in 1874 to tetsugaku marked a deliberate removal of wisdom (ken 賢) from
the Japanese conception of philosophy. In its place, Nishi posited “clarity”
(tetsu 哲).1 Nishi explicitly chose this formulation in order to emphasize that
philosophy was to be understood as an applicable science grounded in the
reality of the world. Through Western sources, where it was used to describe
the practices of academic philosophers, the term was later given to the Chinese
as zhexue (哲学). The contemporary academic locution for philosophy in
China and Japan is therefore the “science of clarity”—a far cry from the “love
of wisdom.”
The inclination of Western philosophers to look to the ancient classics of the
East, however, is mirrored by the inclination of Eastern philosophers to look
to the ancient classics of the West. In other words, there is a driving need to
re-engage with wisdom in its classical sense. Philosophers have become dissat-
isfied with the epistemological emphasis, at least as this emphasis has been
construed for the last several centuries.
In its current state, the academic meaning of philosophy might best be
expressed in the subtleties of its Flemish rendering as Wijsbegeerte, where
begeerte carries the multiple meanings of “want,” “greed,” and “covetousness.”
In this light, it might be said that this volume therefore reflects a broader
tendency in the field, finding dissatisfaction in coveting wise judgments, and a
resurgent aspiration to return to the “love of wisdom.” Both the overwhelming
compulsion to treat wisdom as a commodity that one lacks and trades and the
intellectual derivatives built on its epistemological exchange value are to be left
by the wayside. The consensus that it is high time that we should return to the
embrace of wisdom’s love in the lived world continues to grow.
