Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
Definition: Philosopher |
PhilosopherNoun1. A specialist in philosophy. 2. A wise person who is calm and rational; someone who lives a life of reason with equanimity. Source: WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. |
Date "philosopher" was first used in popular English literature: sometime before 1258. (references) |
Etymology: Philosopher \Phi*los"o*pher\, noun. [from Old English expression philosophre, French philosophe, from Latin expression philosophus, Greek; loving wise. Compare to Philosophy.]. (references) |
| Domain | Definition |
19th Century Satire | One who instead of crying over spilt milk consoles himself with the thought that it was over four-fifths water. Source: Foolish Dictionary, 1904. |
Literature | Philosopher The sages of Greece used to be called sophoi (wise men), but Pythagoras thought the word too arrogant, and adopted the compound philosophoi (lover of wisdom), whence "philosopher," one who courts or loves wisdom. Philosopher. "There was never yes philosopher who could endure the toothache patiently, however they have writ the style of gods, and made a push at chance and sufferance." (Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing, v. 1.) The Philosopher. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus is so called by Justin Martyr. (121, 161-180.) Leo VI., Emperor of the East. (866, 886-911.) Porphyry, the Antichristian. (233-305.) The Philosopher of China. Confucius. His mother called him Little Hillock,, from a knob on the top of his head (B.C. 551-479.) The Philosopher of Ferney. Voltaire; so called from his château of Ferney, near Geneva. (1694-1778.) The Philosopher of Malmesbury. Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan. (1588-1679.) The Philosopher of Persia. Abou Ebn Sina, of Shiraz. (Died 1037.) The Philosopher of Samosata. I acan. "Just such another feast as was that of the Lapithæ described by the philosopher of Samosata."- Rabelais: Pantagruel, book iv. 15. The Philosopher of Sans-Souci'. Frederick the Great (1712, 1740-1786). The Philosopher of Wimbledon. John Horne Took, author of Diversions of Purley. (1736-1812.). Source: Brewer's Dictionary. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
A person devoted to and producing results in philosophy.
Western philosophers in (approximate) historical order
The Presocratics -- Socrates -- Plato -- Aristotle -- Epicurus -- Hellenistic Philosophy -- Avicenna -- Rhazes --Cicero -- Augustine of Hippo -- Anselm -- Aquinas -- William of Ockham -- Francis Bacon -- Sir Thomas Browne--Thomas Hobbes -- Rene Descartes -- Nicolas Malebranche -- Baruch Spinoza -- Gottfried Leibniz -- Blaise Pascal -- John Locke -- George Berkeley -- David Hume -- Thomas Reid -- Dugald Stewart -- Jean Jacques Rousseau -- Charl du Montesquieu -- Voltaire -- Immanuel Kant -- Gottlieb Fichte -- Georg Hegel -- James Mill -- John Stuart Mill -- Karl Marx -- Arthur Schopenhauer -- Søren Kierkegaard -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- Gottlob Frege -- Rudolf Steiner -- Albert Schweizer -- Bertrand Russell -- Alfred North Whitehead -- Karl Popper -- -- G. E. Moore -- Ludwig Wittgenstein -- Rudolph Carnap -- Jean-Paul Sartre -- Albert Camus -- Georg Henrik von Wright -- Mortimer Adler -- W. V. O. Quine -- Nelson Goodman -- Imre Lakatos -- Paul Feyerabend -- Mario Bunge -- Douglas Hofstadter -- Daniel Dennett -- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Eastern philosophers in approximate historical order:
Gautama Buddha -- Lao Zi -- Confucius -- Bodhidharma -- Dogen -- Mao Zedong
Philosophers: listed by philosophical school
See Philosophical Movements.
Nicknames of Medieval Philosophers
Several medieval philosophers have been given Latin nicknames by historians. For example:See Also: Philosophy, Eastern philosophy, Epistemology, Ethics, Metaphysics, Aesthetics, Ontology, Reason, Mathematicians, Scientists, List of philosophers
- Francis Mayron - Doctor acutus, the acute doctor, or Doctor illuminatus
- St. Thomas Aquinas - Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, or Doctor Communis
- William of Ockham - Doctor Invincibilis
- Alexander of Hales - Doctor Irrefragibilis
- Roger Bacon - Doctor Mirabilis, the wonderful doctor
- John Bassol - Doctor Ordinatissimus, the most methodical doctor
- St. Bonaventure - Doctor Seraphicus
- Henry Goethals (Hendricus Bonicollius) - Doctor Solemnis, the solemn doctor
- Richard Middleton - the solid doctor, or the profound doctor
- Duns Scotus - Doctor Subtilis, the discriminating doctor, or Doctor Marianus
- Albertus Magnus - Doctor Universalis
- Durandus de Sancto Portiano - the most resolute doctor
- Thomas Bradwardine - the profound doctor
- Jean Ruysbroeck (Joannes Ruysbrokius) - the divine doctor
The Philosopher is also the nickname of Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 22.
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Philosopher."
| Context | Synonyms within Context (source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus). |
Advice | Phrase: "give every man thine ear but few thy voice"; "I pray thee cease thy counsel"; "my guide, philosopher, and friend"; "'twas good advice and meant, my son be good"; verbum sat sapienti; vive memor leti; "we, ask advice but we mean approbation". |
Scholar | Noun: scholar, connoisseur, savant, pundit, schoolman, professor, graduate, wrangler; academician, academist; master of arts, doctor, gownsman; philosopher, master of math; scientist, clerk; sophist, sophister; linguist; glossolinguist, philologist; philologer; lexicographer, glossographer; grammarian; litterateur, literati, dilettanti, illuminati, cogniscenti; fellow, Hebraist, lexicologist, mullah, munshi, Sanskritish; sinologist, sinologue; Mezzofanti, admirable Crichton, Mecaenas. |
| Source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus. | |
| Domain | Usage | |
Screenplays | Don't call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease (Star Wars; writing credit: George Lucas) I ain't a philosopher! (A Hole in the Head; writing credit: Arnold Schulman;) He's a philosopher. A doubter (Doctor Who; writing credit: Basil Caplan; Martin Defalco) The Scottish philosopher Balfour said that destiny is the scapegoat we make responsible for our crimes (The Invisible Man; writing credit: Craig Silverstein; Jonathan Glassner) Stand up philosopher. I coalesce the vapors of human existence into a viable and meaningful comprehension (History of the World: Part I; writing credit: Mel Brooks) | |
Movie/TV Titles | Squatter and Philosopher O'Hara (1912) Philosopher Varla (1999) | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | ||
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Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
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| Thumbnail | Description & Credit | Thumbnail | Description & Credit |
 | Charles Sanders Peirce Great philosopher, scientist, and mathematician Served 30 years with the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Credit: Coast & Geodetic Survey Historical Image Collection. |  | Front page of "Liber methaurorum / Alberti Magni Ordinis Predicatorum..." published in 1494. Albertus Magnus was a Roman Catholic philosopher and theologian. Credit: Treasures of the Library. |
 | The philosopher. Credit: Library of Congress. |  | Former coal miner sitting on his front porch. He is the town philosopher, Jere, West Viriginia. Repairs his home. Note railing and potato sack awning. Experiments with an elaborate garden on a hill about two miles away. See 50081-E, 50057-E. Credit: Library of Congress. |
 | Coal miner, now unemployed, town philosopher, experiments with garden. Jere, West Virginia. Says, "Jes so long as I sees things movin' and betterin' I don't care how much benefits I get from it." See 50057-E, 30219-M3. Credit: Library of Congress. |  | Thomas Jefferson, a philosopher, a patriote [sic], and a friend / dessiné par son ami Tadée Kosciuszko et gravé par Ml. Sokolnicki. Credit: Library of Congress. |
Source: pictures compiled by the editor from various references; see picture credits. | |||
| Author | Quotation |
Blaise Pascal | To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher. |
Denis Diderot | The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers. |
Diogenes of Sinope | Of what use is a philosopher who doesn't hurt anybody's feelings? |
Henry David Thoreau | To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit it and read it are old women over their tea. |
Jean Jacques Rousseau | Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases. |
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe | A great scholar is seldom a great philosopher. |
| The philosopher must station themselves in the middle. | |
Marcus Terentius Varro | A sick man dreams nothing so dreadful that some philosopher isn't saying it. |
William Shakespeare | For there was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | |
| Title | Author | Quote |
Les Miserables | Hugo, Victor | He had grey hair, a serious eye, the brown complexion of a labourer, and the thoughtful countenance of a philosopher. |
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | Joyce, James | He denounced priestcraft, the philosopher of Middlesex |
Walden | Thoreau, Henry David | For I purposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher, or desired to be one. |
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead | Tom Stoppard | A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | ||
| Subject | Topic | Quote |
Health | Famous people who are known or rumored to have had epilepsy include the Russian writer Dostoyevsky, the philosopher Socrates, the military general Napoleon, and the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, who established the Nobel prize. (references) | |
Lexicography | Devil's Dictionary | EPICURE, n. An opponent of Epicurus, an abstemious philosopher who, holding that pleasure should be the chief aim of man, wasted no time in gratification from the senses. |
Source: compiled by the editor from ICON Group International, Inc.; see credits. | ||
| Speaker | Phrase(s) |
Mattie Stepanek | Spread my peace throughout the world. And I want to expand more and keep writing and keep speaking. And when I am gone, I want to be remembered as a poet, a peacemaker, and a philosopher who plays. |
Michael Chertoff | That's correct. And a lot of people consider him to be the kind of brains or the philosopher behind bin Laden's organization. He is a physician, he's from Egypt, he is someone who has been a radical terrorist for a long period of time. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| "Philosopher" is generally used as a noun (singular) -- approximately 97.15% of the time. "Philosopher" is used about 525 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted) |
| Parts of Speech | Percent | Usage per 100 Million Words | Rank in English |
| Noun (singular) | 97.15% | 510 | 11,877 |
| Lexical Verb (base form) | 2.28% | 12 | 101,599 |
| Noun (proper) | 0.57% | 3 | 202,518 |
| Total | 100.00% | 525 | N/A |
Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.
Expressions using "philosopher": moral philosopher ♦ natural philosopher. Additional references. | |
| Hyphenated Usage | |
Beginning with "philosopher": philosopher-agronomists, philosopher-humanists, philosopher-king, philosopher-kings, philosopher-psychologist, philosopher-ruler, philosopher-scientist, philosopher-scientists, philosopher-theologian. | |
Ending with "philosopher": artist-philosopher. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
| Language | Translations for "philosopher"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses. | |
Albanian | filozof. (various references) | |
Arabic | فيلسوف, حكيم (canny, clever, compos mentis, discreet, doctor, judicious, physician, politic, provident, prudent, sage, sapient, well advised, wise, wise man), شخص ذو نظرة فلسفية. (various references) | |
Bulgarian | философ. (various references) | |
Chinese | 哲學家 , 哲学家. (various references) | |
Czech | filozof. (various references) | |
Dutch | filosoof. (various references) | |
Esperanto | filozofo. (various references) | |
Farsi | فیلسوف . (various references) | |
Finnish | filosofi. (various references) | |
French | philosophe. (various references) | |
German | Philosoph. (various references) | |
Greek | φιλόσοφοσ, φιλόσοφος. (various references) | |
Hebrew | פילוסוף, הוגה דעות. (various references) | |
Hungarian | filozófus (eclectic, peripatetic, thinker), gondolkodó (pensive, reasonable, reflective), bölcselő, bölcs (advised, prudent, sage, sententious, wise). (various references) | |
Indonesian | filsuf. (various references) | |
Irish | fealsamh. (various references) | |
Italian | filosofo (thinker). (various references) | |
Japanese Kanji | 哲人 (sage, wise man). (various references) | |
Japanese Katakana | てつがくしゃ, てつじん (sage, strong man, wise man). (various references) | |
Korean | 철학자. (various references) | |
Manx | fallsoonagh (schoolman). (various references) | |
Papiamen | filósofo. (various references) | |
Pig Latin | ilosopherphay.(various references) | |
Portuguese | filósofo (philosophic, philosophical, sage). (various references) | |
Romanian | om raţional, filozof (notionalist), înţelept (advisedly, nestor, philosophic, philosophical, politic, profound, prudent, ripe, sagacious, sage, sapient, thinking, well advised, wise, wisely). (various references) | |
Russian | философ. (various references) | |
Scottish | feallsanach, caileadair. (various references) | |
Serbo-Croatian | filosof. (various references) | |
Spanish | filósofo. (various references) | |
Swedish | filosof. (various references) | |
Turkish | kalender kimse, filozof (original thinker, thinker), felsefeci, düşünceli kişi, düşünür (original thinker, thinker). (various references) | |
Ukrainian | філософ, алхімік (adept, alchemist, hermetic). (various references) | |
Vietnamese | nhà triết học người bình thản trong mọi hoàn cảnh. (various references) | |
Welsh | athronydd, anianydd (naturalist, physicist). (various references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various translation references. | ||
| Language | Period | Translations |
| Latin | 500 BCE-Modern | philosophi, sapiens, sapiente, sapientem, sapientes, sapienti, sapientibus, sapientis, sapientium. (various references) |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | ||
Derivations | |
Words beginning with "philosopher": philosophers. (additional references) | |
Words ending with "philosopher": nonphilosopher. (additional references) | |
Words containing "philosopher": nonphilosophers. (additional references) | |
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"Philosopher" is suggested in spellcheckers for the following: philosofer, philosoper, philosoph, philosophare, philosophe, philosophes, philosophia, Philosophorum, philospher, pholosopher. (additional references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references). | |
| # of Phoneme Matches | Pronunciation | Word(s) rhyming with "philosopher" (pronounced fulÄ"sufer) |
| 4 | -s u f er | Lucifer. |
| 3 | -u f er | aquifer, autobiographer, biographer, choreographer, cinematographer, conifer, crystallographer, demographer, geographer, lexicographer, oceanographer, photographer, pornographer, stenographer, videographer. |
Source: compiled by the editor (additional references); see credits. | ||
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
| Words within the letters "e-h-h-i-l-o-o-p-p-r-s" | |
-1 letter: philosophe. | |
-2 letters: phosphore. | |
-3 letters: phosphor, polisher, porpoise, propolis, repolish, rheophil, sloppier. | |
-4 letters: hirples, hoopers, hoppers, hoppier, hopples, lippers, loopers, loopier, loppers, loppier, opposer, orioles, poorish, propels, propose, ripples, shipper, shopper, slipper, soppier, spoiler. | |
-5 letters: ephori, ephors, helios, hipper, hippos, hirple, hirsel, hirsle, holier, holies, hoolie, hooper, hopers, hopper, hopple, hosier, isohel, lipper, lisper, looies, looper. | |
| Words containing the letters "e-h-h-i-l-o-o-p-p-r-s" | |
+1 letter: philosophers. | |
+2 letters: philosophizer. | |
+3 letters: nonphilosopher, philosophizers. | |
+4 letters: nonphilosophers, phosphorylative. | |
+5 letters: chemoprophylaxis, neurohypophysial. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
