Philosophy's First Institution Was a Gym, and Its Founder's Nickname Came From His Wrestling Coach
Antigone's essay argues that philosophy's original meaning — a deeply practical way of life — has largely been lost, replaced by a bookish and sterile academic field. Philosophy as the Greeks and later the Romans conceived it asked a different question: how do I live the best life?
The essay puts its much more fitting birthplace in a wrestling gym, “initiated by blows dealt between athletes.” And when the first institution of philosophy was created, the essay's summary notes, it was located in, of all places, a gym.
The summary is blunter still about the man behind it: the most influential philosopher in history got his famous name from his wrestling coach for being muscularly broad-shouldered. That is a better origin story than philosophy usually tells about itself, and it costs nothing to believe.
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The lament about “bookish and sterile” is doing a lot of work here. How do I live the best life is precisely the sort of question you answer in prose, badly, over years — which is roughly what a seminar is for.
But a coach naming the man for his shoulders and a school set on the ground where blows were exchanged make a stranger claim than “philosophy used to be practical”: it says the argument started in the match.