Philosophy =the love of wisdom?

The word love has many synonyms. Lets change it to the search for wisdom. Wisdom means accumulated learning. After we have learned then what do we do? Use it for...our personal use,community what? What does it mean to be wise? If we do not understand or believe what we have learned as(knowledge) what have we gained? pljames

 

Can it also be "the wisdom of love"?

 

I do not agree with your definition.

Wisdom is quiet abit more than an accumulation of knowledge. It is the ability to be visionary when others are blind.

An illiterate person can be quite wise. A child can have wisdom beyond their years. So you see, it is not an accumulation of knowledge or learned behavior.

It is the ability to see.



x

 

Maybe wisdom is the result of constant questioning, and like xenon said, the ability to see, not only to see the subjective world, but trying to rise above your own person by questioning your subjective mind...

Don't know if that makes sense, kinda tired atm .

 

Wisdom is the application of accumlated knowledge. So wisdom would be the ability of properly using the gained knowledge/learning.

 

I think that besides knowledge, wisdom comes with lots of patience and experience, which only happens thrrough time and ones own life experiences.

 

Being wise is like being good at masturbation, and so is 99.7 percent of everything that is discussed on these forums.

 

You must be a real fan of masturbation then, or maybe your 750 posts are all related to the .3% of stuff that isn't compared to it.

 

The thing about wisdom/masturbation is, it's not about whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game...

 

This is why i love wisdom

 

I agree - wisdom is much more than accumulated knowledge. It may perahps grow through accumulation of experience.

Love is part of wisdom really. The wise know that it is the only glue which holds this human universe together and makes it tolerable.

 

Wisdom to me is the realization and acceptance that you DON'T know.

 

Well if you don't then yes, that's true.

 

Well, it comes from Plato's Apology, where Socrates is on trial for various charges.

But during his defense, he gives an anecdote of a friend he had that went to see the oracle. His friend asked the oracle if any man was wiser than Socrates, and the oracle replied, "no one is wiser."

Anyhow, Socrates then goes to see if this is true, by talking to all the Athenians. He comes to find out that while many people have knowledge of at least SOMETHING, they also at the same time esteem their knowledge higher than what it is worth, or think that the knowledge that they DO have somehow entitles them to be experts on seperate matter in which they know nothing about. So, while they all indeed possesed knowledge, none of them were wise.

It's an interesting story, one that I think is still applicable to this day.

- I should add that "no one is wiser" doesn't have to be taken as a positive phrase. It could either mean, "Socrates is the wisest", or "Socrates is not wise, but everyone else is even worse."

Which adds another interesting twist to the story, because what is worse than ignorance in a scale of wisdom? I'd say ignorance without a conscious acknowledgement of ignorance, or ignorance with no desire to dispell ignorance.


(but then again, I really dont know! )

 

Yes - I've read Plato.

It's really quite obvious that one attribute of a wise person is that they acknowledge that they have areas of ignorance. Given the scale of possible knowledge, we could say this applies to everyone.

On the other hand, where one does have some definite knowledge - eg. of Greek philosophy, it is also wisdom to acknowledge that.

We're talking here about intellectual knowledge I suppose. It has also been proposed that there is a kind of supra-rational knowledge. Plotinus gave it a term which I forget off hand, but generally the Greek term 'gnosis' is what I mean. Indian philosophy calls 'jnana', and the words are said by linguists to have a common root.
I think this is either something one has or has not. One can have it to varying degrees. In a sense it includes wisdom.

The trouble is that people are generally full of pride and don't like to admit their own ignorance. This operates on different levels.
For instance, materialists scoff at the whole idea of 'gnosis'. The religious will often claim to have it, even though they have not.
My opinion is that one should take a modest attiude - never claim to know what you don't really know. But also not to loose sight of the value of what one does know.

 

I'd say this is a fitting quote

"Whoever understakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

 

DISAGREE. Wisdom is the throwing away of all accumulated knowledge and conditioned thinking. There's nothing to know outside of thinking!

 

In my experience, wisdom is quotable thinking, a set of maxims that people cite as world-defining when they're true but completely ignore when they're not.

 

example?

 

"Too many cooks spoil the broth", whereas "many hands make light work". You pick the one you want to believe depending on the situation, but neither becomes any less wise for being totally contradicted by other wisdom.