philosopher
Pluralphilosophers
- 1A scholar or expert who takes part in or contributes to philosophical inquiry.
The philosopher defended the view that consciousness cannot be reduced to brain states.
Contemporary philosophers continue to debate the foundations of moral knowledge.
Similarthinker
- 2A person engaged in the study of philosophy.
As a philosopher in her first year, she struggled to follow the ancient arguments.
The young philosophers met after class to argue over the day's lecture.
- 3A person devoted to the love of wisdom.
He lived as a philosopher, less a teacher than a tireless seeker of wisdom.
The ancients held that true philosophers loved wisdom for its own sake.
Note
The sense the word was built to carry: Greek philósophos is literally "lover of wisdom," and Pythagoras is credited with coining it to describe himself. It reached English through Latin philosophus and French philosophe, displacing the native Old English ūþwita. Today it fits best when you mean an attitude rather than a profession: the seeker after wisdom, not the academic expert.
Less common meanings
- 4A person who applies philosophical principles to daily life, staying calm and rational in the face of inevitable change.
Like a steady captain who keeps an even temper as the storm rolls in.
A true philosopher, he met the loss of his fortune without bitterness or complaint.
She bore the grim news like a philosopher, composed and unshaken.
Note
An older ideal of character more than of learning: someone who meets misfortune calmly. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) uses the typical frame: "the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given." Modern English keeps the idea mostly in the adjective, as in being philosophical about a setback. In present-day prose, "took it like a philosopher" sounds deliberately old-fashioned.
- 5A student, scholar, or expert in any branch of knowledge, especially fields studied before they were regarded as pure science.
The philosopher demonstrated that air had weight by filling glass vessels and weighing them with care.
Across Europe, philosophers debated whether light traveled as waves or as particles.
Note
Before the sciences had their own names, anyone who investigated nature was a philosopher too. In older texts, a philosopher who weighs air or argues about the nature of light is doing what we would now call science. The sense is archaic, so use it only when writing about that earlier world of learning or in its manner.
- 6A practitioner of alchemy.
The philosopher labored over his furnace, hoping to turn lead into gold.
Then thus conclude I, since that God of heaven Will not that these philosophers neven How that a man shall come unto this stone, I rede as for the best to let it gon.
1813, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: The Canon's Yeoman's TaleNote
Alchemy borrowed the word for its own adepts. In Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's Tale, "these philosophers" are the men chasing the stone that turns base metal to gold. The sense is obsolete on its own but survives in one fixed phrase, the philosopher's stone, which Bertrand Russell still uses in his History of Western Philosophy (1945). Outside that phrase, say alchemist.
Practice
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Origin
It comes from Ancient Greek φιλόσοφος (philósophos), literally 'lover of wisdom', which is said to have been coined by Pythagoras to describe himself. The word passed through Latin philosophus and Anglo-Norman or Middle French philosophe into Middle English philosophre, replacing the native Old English ūþwita.