Introduction: The Origins of Philosophia

This introductory chapter presents a brief overview of the history of philosophia—the Greek name, and the discipline that it came to name. It shows that, beginning around 500 BCE, the coinage of a “love of wisdom” was met with a wry verbal slight. But a century and a half later, the term is revealed in the maturity of an institution that is continuous with today's departments of philosophy. This phenomenon—accommodating a name-calling name and consolidating a structured group around it—recurs through history, as the cases of the Quakers, Shakers, Freaks, and queer activists illustrate. A norm-policing name, at first distasteful, gets appropriated, facilitates a new and ennobling self-understanding, and then governs a productive and tight-knit social enterprise. The chapter argues that such is the origin of philosophia.