The Greek word sophia properly refers to cleverness or skill in handicraft and the productive arts, such as carpentry, music, singing, poetry, chariot driving, medicine, and even divination. In short it tends to pick out the sort of excellence in a particular domain that derives from experience and expertise. In early applications of the term to "wise men," for example the Seven Sages, the term referred primarily to the sorts of skills that would make for expertise in matters of common life and so was virtually synonymous with practical wisdom or prudence (phronêsis). By the late fifth century BCE, however, the term was coming to have a more specialized meaning having to do with technical skill and the expertise derived from expert training and experience; that is, it encompassed both a knowledge base and an intimate familiarity with the applications of that knowledge base. The Sophists in particular claimed to have this sort of knowledgeable expertise in many different areas, from medicine to mathematics, oratory, and political science. Indeed, the name "sophistēs" simply means someone who makes a profession of the practice and teaching of such sorts of knowledge.
In Plato, "sophia" clearly has more philosophical connotations. Already in the early, Socratic dialogues we find an attempt to draw a distinction between the kinds of "expertise" that Sophists had and the sort of genuine reflective wisdom modeled by Socrates. For Plato, the former is clearly mere logical chicanery used to generate linguistic puzzles for the purpose of winning debates (see, for example, Socrates' line of reasoning in the Gorgias 464b–465e). By the time Plato wrote the Theaetetus, he had clearly settled on an antisophistic conception of knowledge and expertise that takes the life and methodology of Socrates as its model, though even in that arguably late dialogue there is no clear line of demarcation drawn between sophia and epistēmē (knowledge). Since, for Plato, all knowledge, whether of mathematical objects or normative concepts such as the virtues, involves cognitive grasp of purely formal entities, there is less demand in his epistemology for a clear and concise differentiation between the two types of mental states and their proper objects.
Aristotle, by contrast, drew rather sharp distinctions not only between epistēmē and sophia, but also among those rational faculties and phronêsis (practical wisdom), technē (art, skill), and nous (intelligence, understanding). Yet the relation of sophia to the other rational faculties is somewhat specialized. In the Nicomachean Ethics (VI.7, 1141a9–b3), Aristotle began by noting the traditional use of the word "sophia" to denote those who have mastered their craft (technē) in a most exacting way, but added that it was also used to denote those who are "wise in general and not in one department," and he gave this as his reason for thinking that sophia is the "most perfect of the modes of knowledge." Thus sophia is associated with both technē and epistēmē, but it marks off a superlative kind of knowledge in which the knower not only fully understands the consequences of the principles of his craft but also fully understands the natures of the principles themselves. There is thus a sense in which sophia encompasses both the necessary truths that follow from demonstrations (the domain of epistēmē) and the necessary truths that are the first principles of the demonstrative sciences (the domain of nous). In the Metaphysics (981b28), this controlling wisdom is said to have the causes and first principles of all the other intellectual faculties as its proper objects, and so it is the highest form of wisdom.
The Stoics likewise took sophia as the perfection of human understanding (Seneca, Epistulae 89.4), and as consisting in a fully comprehensive and systematic grasp of the rational order in the universe. They characterized sophia as "knowledge of the divine and the human," with some adding "and their causes" (von Arnim, 2.35; Seneca, Epistulae 89.5). They also regarded this understanding as the crucial underpinning for the goal of leading a moral life and hence considered it a virtue.
In later antiquity, sophia held an even more elevated place. In the early Christian theologies of Philo Judaeus and Origen, it is associated with logos (word) and thus with the daughter or son of God, respectively. A central feature of the various Gnostic movements was the personification of sophia as a salvation figure. In some systems there were two sorts of sophia, Wisdom from above and Wisdom from below, representing the female, or noumenal, world and the male, or material, world, respectively. This dualism of sophia came in varying degrees. In Marcionism, a heretical doctrine of the second through fifth centuries and the most dualistic system of all, salvation consisted of accepting the wisdom that comes from the Good God and rejecting whatever comes from the Demiurge.
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Gladigow, Burkhard. Sophia und Kosmos: Untersuchungen zur Frühgeschichte von Sophos und Sophia. Hildesheim, Germany: Olms, 1964.
Hankinson, R. J. "Natural Criteria and the Transparency of Judgment: Philo, Antiochus, and Galen on Epistemological Justification." In Assent and Argument: Studies in Cicero's Academic Books, edited by Brad Inwood and Jaap Mansfeld, 161–216. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997.
Menn, Stephen. "Physics as a Virtue." Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 11 (1997): 1–34.
Motte, André. "Cicerón et Aristote: A propos de la distinction entre la sophia et la phronèsis." In Aristotelica: Mélanges offerts à Marcel de Corte, edited by André Motte and Christian Rutten, 263–303. Brussels: Éditions Ousia, 1985.
Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963.
Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. Epistulae morales ad Lucilium [by] Seneca. Selected and translated by Robin Campbell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Von Arnim, Hans. Stoicorum veterum fragmenta. Leipzig, Germany: B. G. Teubneri, 1903–1924.
Woodruff, Paul. "Plato's Early Theory of Knowledge." In Epistemology, edited by Stephen Everson, 60–84. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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