Chen, Lijun: The History of the Definition of "Wisdom": Grammatical Dilemma and Its Breakthrough --- From Essential Inquiry to Genetic Description

Philosophy is said to be "the love of wisdom," yet throughout the long tradition of Western philosophy, "wisdom" has lacked a rigorous, non-circular definition. This paper argues that the history of Western philosophy's definitions of wisdom follows a discernible recursive trajectory---from classical ontology through modern epistemology to contemporary linguistic analysis---where each attempt at definition fails to escape circularity but thereby reveals the structure of that circularity more cle