Re-examination of the Origin of "Philosophy"
Noburu Notomi
Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Faculty of Letters
The Origin of Philosophy
"Philosophy" (philosophia) is said to have been born in Ancient Greece. This raises a fundamental question about "philosophy": how can philosophy, which has such particular historical backgrounds and therefore is a peculiarly Western way of thinking, be a universal activity of human beings? To this question, I would propose that only through the examination of the origin of philosophy, namely, Socrates and Plato, we can reveal its essence.The Unity of Plato's Sophist
My book, The Unity of Plato's Sophist - Between the Sophist and the Philosopher -, published from Cambridge University Press in April 1999, focuses on one of Plato's major works, the Sophist, and gives an interpretation of the dialogue as a whole. The earlier version of the monograph was submitted to Cambridge University as my Ph.D. thesis, and with several suggestions from the examiners and other scholars, I extensively revised the thesis and added new arguments. The work has been included in the Cambridge Classical Studies Series.The Sophist and the Philosopher
My main contention in this book is that Plato, through several attempts at defining the sophist, shows what a philosopher should be. The sophists were professional teachers and rhetoricians in the fifth to fourth century BC. and had great influence on their contemporary democratic society and culture. Plato in the Sophist defines the sophist as one who "appears to be wise but is not really", and thus demarcates him from the genuine philosopher, who admits his own ignorance and continues to inquire into truth. However, the sophist, antithesis of philosophy, does not live outside you and me, but is within ourselves. One can become a philosopher only by confronting the sophistic challenge against philosophy and by securing the very possibility of dialogue, and of philosophy.Dialogue between East and West
My experience of staying and studying in Britain has taught me the necessity and possibility of having dialogue between different cultures, especially between East and West. After a hundred years of Japan's introducing Western sciences and philosophy, now we Japanese people should send messages back to Europe. I believe that the re-examination of the origin of philosophy and the Western civilization will be a good starting point of this dialogue.
Noburu Notomi was born in 1965. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in philosophy from Tokyo University. In 1991-1996 he studied at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge University, and completed his Ph.D. in 1995. His research is mainly on ancient Western philosophy, and besides The Unity of Plato's Sophist, he published several articles on Plato and Aristotle in English and Japanese. Also, he organized the Kyushu University "Space" Project in 1997-1999, an interdisciplinary project that resulted in his editing Perspectives on Space (Kyushu University Press, 1999), which included contributions by scholars from various disciplines such as geography, archaeology, architecture, sociology, politics, law and economics. In this work Professor Notomi examines the concept of fûdo in terms of self-understanding.
