Usage of the term ‘philosophy’ in the time of Isokrates

In a, passage of the Phaedros just before that quoted at the beginning of the last chapter, Sokrates asks what a man is to be called, who, whatever may be his particular line of work—whether for instance he is a Homer, a Lysias, or a Solon—works in the light of true knowledge, using no terms which he cannot define, making no statements which he is not prepared to defend. It might be presumptuous, Sokrates says, to call such a man, or any man, ‘wise;’ but he may fairly be called ‘a lover of wisdom,’ a ‘philosopher.’ It is probable that the term f philosophy’—said to have been invented by Pythagoras— did not come into general use at Athens much before the time of Sokrates; and that, for nearly a century at least, ‘philosopher’ continued to be the laudatory name for the man of intellectual or literary pursuits generally,—as ‘sophist,’ used with the same large meaning, came by degrees to have more and more of a disparaging sense. The paramount intellectual eminence of Plato and Aristotle, as well as the lessened importance of Rhetoric after the extinction of the old political life, led to the name ‘philosopher’ being gradually appropriated, from about the end of the 4th century B.c, to the speculative seeker for truth. Aristeides, writing in the latter half of the second century A. D., objects to this restriction of the term, saying that in the best times ‘philosophy’ meant simply ‘literary study and refinement;—being used, not in its present sense, but for discipline or culture (παιδεία) generally.’