‘Sophia’ and ‘Epistēmē’ in the Archaic and Classical Periods

Abstract

In philosophical contexts the originally Ionic noun 'sophiē', later Attic 'sophia' are standardly translated as 'wisdom', the adjective 'sophos' as 'wise'. But this will not do for the earliest, pre-philosophical use (cp. Snell 1924: 1-20, Gauthier and Jolif 1959: 479-89, Gladigow 1965, Meier 1970). In eighth and seventh century poetry 'sophiē' means 'skill', 'sophos' 'skilled' or 'skillful'. As we will see, wisdom is skill; but in the early poets the skills denoted by these terms are not forms of wisdom. Formal semanticists have noted that 'skill', 'skillful', and 'skilled' are semantically incomplete terms in the sense that a person who has skill or is skillful isn't skillful simpliciter, but in a particular domain. Compare 'citizen', which is semantically incomplete in a distinct, but related way: one is not a citizen simpliciter, but of a particular political body. There are various theories of such semantic incompleteness. In the case of 'skillful' one view is that in its so-called logical, as opposed to surface grammatical, form the predicate contains a domain variable whose value is supplied by context (be it linguistic or extra-linguistic). So the logical form of 'x is skillful' may be represented as: