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Philosophy as the love of wisdom is informative and can be inspiring and generative to students; it opens up possibilities for philosophical thinking to be more relevant for everyday life. Highlighting philosophy as the love of wisdom emphasizes the ancient and deep-rooted value of philosophy and does not restrict philosophy to the use of specific methodologies or to a specific subject matter, but rather expands it to encompassing a way of life. In this way, philosophy is meant to help promote valuable human lives and the public good at large. Philosophy as the love of wisdom is a call to remember that philosophy is not only a discipline to be studied in academia. Plato’s Socrates can be interpreted as a paragon of philosophy as a way of life and as exemplifying a love of wisdom. Contrary to philosophy as the love of wisdom, the popular conception of philosophy—as the paramount use of logic and argumentation—can be alienating. The scholastic or instrumental view of education promotes this popular conception and conceptually segregates the different academic disciplines. When this occurs, education is not seen as continuous with life. To move beyond the narrow and popular conception of philosophy, it is helpful to look at how John Dewey explicitly connects philosophy and education: when considering the many different types of education, one should not forget the ethical value of the given intellectual pursuits. This opens up space for the peripheries of philosophy to be more centralized. Emotion, art, and practical considerations of everyday life are illuminated as the material of philosophic thinking. Philosophy is the lived love of wisdom.

Two of the most important works of Plato are The Republic and The Apology. In each of these writings there is an answer to a question such as “what can be said about the wisdom of those individuals who develop and create educational programs?” Plato offers two alternative answers to this question. In The Republic Plato clearly develops the notion that it is reasonable to assume that wise individuals possess valuable, important, and worthwhile information. On the other hand, in The Apology Plato explains that his teacher, Socrates, spent a lifetime trying to develop the complex notion that wise individuals become wise when they recognize that all human wisdom is worth little or nothing at all. Socrates can be viewed as claiming that all human beings are so fallible that they should not create educational programs that tell others what they should do during the school day. Further, schools that endorse the notion that wise individuals do not possess valuable knowledge suggest that all members of a school community (including teachers and students) are fallible authorities who need to have their power and influence significantly limited by a democratic process. Since the time of Plato many educators have endorsed the notion that they possess wisdom. Often the wisdom that educators assume for themselves translates into the notion that a school should teach a standardized academic curriculum. To be sure, over the ages many educators have disagreed with one another about what ideas, information, or knowledge should be included in a standardized academic curriculum. Yet the notion of a standardized academic curriculum is not often challenged. In fact, educational programs or schools that assume the desirability of a standardized academic curriculum have become the dominant alternatives in Western societies. Opposing alternatives, which are often ignored, are schools or educational programs that do not teach a standardized academic curriculum. Two schools that presently exist as pilot educational programs that endorse the notion of a non-standardized academic curriculum are Summerhill School and Sudbury Valley School. Summerhill was founded in the 1920s by A. S. Neill. Daniel A. Greenberg, a self-styled educational theorist, was one of the founding members of the Sudbury Valley School in the late 1960s. These pilot programs seem to endorse the view of wisdom that claims wise people are wise when they realize that their wisdom is worth little or nothing at all. The writings of Karl R. Popper provide an example of a 20th-century philosopher who tried throughout his life to revive the view of wisdom that wise people are aware of the notion that they do not possess true wisdom. Popper’s efforts to criticize the traditional view of wisdom and revive the nontraditional view help provide an intellectual foundation for schools such as Summerhill and Sudbury Valley. These schools function as liberal, democratic, self-governing communities where all school members are fallible authorities who are personally responsible for creating their own school activities.

While the moon naturally featured in Mediterranean cultures from time immemorial, principally noted in the earliest literature as a marker of time, time-dependent constructs such as the calendar, and time-related activities, awareness and recognition of the five visible planets came relatively late to the Greeks and thence to the Romans. The moon underlies the local calendars of the Greeks, with documentary and literary evidence from the Late Bronze Age through the Imperial Roman period, and there are signs that the earliest Roman calendar also paid homage to the moon in its divisions of the month. However, although Homer in the 8th century BCE knows of a Morning and an Evening Star, he shows no indication of realizing that these are one and the same, the planet Venus. That particular identification may have come in the 6th century BCE, and it appears to have been not until the 4th century BCE that the Greeks recognized the other four planets visible to the naked eye—Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury. This awareness probably came via contact with Babylonian astronomy and astrology, where identification and observations of the planets had figured from the 2nd millennium BCE and served as a basis for astrological prognostications. But it is time, not astrology, that lies at the heart of Greek and Roman concerns with the moon and the planets. Indeed, the need to tell time accurately has been regarded as the fundamental motivation of Greek astronomy. A major cultural issue that long engaged the Greeks was how to synchronize the incommensurate cycles of the moon and the sun for calendrical purposes. Given the apparent irregularities of their cycles, the planets might seem to offer no obvious help with regard to time measurement. Nonetheless they were included by Plato in the 4th century BCE in his cosmology, along with the sun and moon, as heavenly bodies created specifically to compute time. Astrology then provided a useful framework in which the sun, moon, planets, and stars all combined to enable the interpretation and forecasting of life events. It became necessary for the Greeks, and their successors the Romans, to be able to calculate as accurately as possible the positions of the heavenly bodies in order to determine readings of the past, present, and future. Greek astronomy had always had a speculative aspect, as philosophers strove to make sense of the visible cosmos. A deep-seated assumption held by Greek astronomers, that the heavenly bodies moved in uniform, circular orbits, lead to a desire over the centuries to account for or explain away the observed irregularities of planetary motions with their stations and retrogradations. This intention “to save the phenomena,”— that is, to preserve the fundamental circularity—was said to have originated with Plato. While arithmetical schemes had sufficed in Babylonia for such calculation, it was a Greek innovation to devise increasingly complex geometric theories of circular motions (eccentrics and epicycles) in an effort to understand how the sun, moon, and planets moved, so as to place them more precisely in time and space.