Listening to the Logos

Speech and the Coming of Wisdom in Ancient Greece

Christopher Lyle Johnstone

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781570038549
• eBook ISBN: 9781611171754
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

An exploration of the role of language arts in forming and expressing wisdom from Homer to Aristotle

In Listening to the Logos, Christopher Lyle Johnstone provides an unprecedented comprehensive account of the relationship between speech and wisdom across almost four centuries of evolving ancient Greek thought and teachings—from the mythopoetic tradition of Homer and Hesiod to Aristotle's treatises.

Johnstone grounds his study in the cultural, conceptual, and linguistic milieu of archaic and classical Greece, which nurtured new ways of thinking about and investigating the world. He focuses on accounts of logos and wisdom in the surviving writings and teachings of Homer and Hesiod, the Presocratics, the Sophists and Socrates, Isocrates and Plato, and Aristotle. Specifically Johnstone highlights the importance of language arts in both speculative inquiry and practical judgment, a nexus that presages connections between philosophy and rhetoric that persist still. His study investigates concepts and concerns key to the speaker's art from the outset: wisdom, truth, knowledge, belief, prudence, justice, and reason. From these investigations certain points of coherence emerge about the nature of wisdom—that wisdom includes knowledge of eternal principles, both divine and natural; that it embraces practical, moral knowledge; that it centers on apprehending and applying a cosmic principle of proportion and balance; that it allows its possessor to forecast the future; and that the oral use of language figures centrally in obtaining and practicing it.

Johnstone's interdisciplinary account ably demonstrates that in the ancient world it was both the content and form of speech that most directly inspired, awakened, and deepened the insights comprehended under the notion of wisdom.

Index

Academy, 148, 151, 163, 189–90

Achilles, 19–20, 28, 32

aêr, 51, 72, 75, 235n32

Against the Schoolmasters (Sextus), 98

Against the Sophists (Isocrates), 153

Agamemnon, 19–20, 28, 32, 40–41

Agathon, 175–76

agôn, 41–42, 83–84, 90, 99, 115, 137, 145, 221. See also elenchos; eristic

aidôs, 93, 245n14

aitia, 194, 197, 200–201, 206

akrasia, 135, 256–57n90

Alcibiades, 127, 141, 149, 179, 258nn3–4

Alexander the Great, 190–91, 231n39, 264n5

Anaxagoras, 71–72

and nous, 72–74

Anaximander, 46–51, 233n21, 233n23, 234n27, 235n30

DK 12 A9, 149

Anaximenes, 51, 235nn31–32

Andronicus, 264–65n6

Antidosis (Isocrates), 146, 154, 157, 259–60n13, 260n15

Antiphon, 95–97, 144, 245n13, 246n19, 247n23

apeiron, 47–51, 234n25, 234n27, 235n32

Aphrodite, 19–21, 174

Apollo, 19, 28, 32, 64, 89

priestess of Pythian Apollo at Delphi, 128, 230n33

Apologia (Xenophon), 125

Apology (Plato), 86, 127–28, 132–33, 135

aporia, 128, 138, 165, 182, 208

archai, 83, 186, 194, 196–98, 200–201, 205–6, 213

archê, 7, 34, 73, 84–85, 232n15

and Anaximander, 46–50, 72, 234n25

and Anaximenes, 51, 235n32

and Aristotle, 201, 204

and Diogenes, 75, 242n87

and Thales, 42–46

Archelaus, 74, 86, 127

archên, 42, 47

Archidamus (Isocrates), 154

A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• One The Greek Stones Speak: Toward an Archaeology of Consciousness
• Two Singing the Muses’ Song: Myth, Wisdom, and Speech
• Three Physis, Kosmos, Logos: Presocratic Thought and the Emergence of Nature-Consciousness
• Four Sophistical Wisdom, Socratic Wisdom, and the Political Life
• Five Civic Wisdom, Divine Wisdom: Isocrates, Plato, and Two Visions for the Athenian Citizen
• Six Speculative Wisdom, Practical Wisdom: Aristotle and the Culmination of Hellenic Thought
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index