Calling Philosophers Names

Available since the end of 2019, my new book with Princeton University Press, Calling Philosophers Names: On the Origins of a Discipline (amazon.com).

For an interview about the book with the Irish Times, see here: “What’s so funny about philosophers.”

Here’s the official marketing copy:

An original and provocative book that illuminates the origins of philosophy in ancient Greece by revealing the surprising early meanings of the word “philosopher”

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Calling Philosophers Names provides a groundbreaking account of the origins of the term philosophos or “philosopher” in ancient Greece. Tracing the evolution of the word’s meaning over its first two centuries, Christopher Moore shows how it first referred to aspiring political sages and advice-givers, then to avid conversationalists about virtue, and finally to disciplinary investigators who focused on the scope and conditions of those conversations. Questioning the familiar view that philosophers from the beginning “loved wisdom” or merely “cultivated their intellect,” Moore shows that they were instead mocked as laughably hopeful that their incessant talking and study would earn them social status or political and moral authority.

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Taking a new approach to the history of early Greek philosophy, Calling Philosophers Names seeks to understand who were called philosophoi or “philosophers” and why, and how the use of and reflections on the word contributed to rise of a discipline. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, the book demonstrates that a word that began in part as a wry reference to a far-flung political bloc, came, hardly a century later, to mean a life of determined self-improvement based on research, reflection, and deliberation. Early philosophy dedicated itself to justifying its own dubious-seeming enterprise. And this original impulse to seek legitimacy holds novel implications for understanding the history of the discipline and its subsequent influence.