A Companion to Public Philosophy

27Philosophical Spaces¹

IAN OLASOV

“[P]hilosophers require neither tools nor special places for their productive work; similarly, wherever in the inhabited world someone sets down his thought, it touches the truth on all sides equally as if it were present there.”

—Aristotle, quoted in Iamblichus, De Communi Mathematica Scientia (trans. Hutchinson and Johnson)

“Wisdom sits in places. It’s like water that never dries up. You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you? Well, you also need to drink from places. You must remember everything about them. You must learn their names. You must remember what happened at them long ago. You must think about it and keep on thinking about it. Then your mind will become smoother and smoother. Then you will see danger before it happens. You will walk a long way and live a long time. You will be wise.”(Dudley Patterson, quoted in Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache)

1 Introduction

Where do we do philosophy? Maybe professional spaces come to mind first: offices, studies, meeting rooms, classrooms, university libraries. Some of these spaces are solitary; all are more or less inaccessible. Maybe we think of bars, coffee shops, dinner tables, parties, or the paths we carve out on walks through our neighborhoods or nature. An indefinite range of philosophical spaces comes into view when we consider other scenes, cultures, and time periods: the stoa, agora, lyceum, monastery, meditation room, salon, debate ...