There is not just a war: recalling the therapeutic metaphor in western metaphilosophy

This paper offers a critical response to the claims of Sivin and Lloyd (2002) and Mattice (2014) to the effect that Greek and Roman philosophy was characterised by a predominance of combat metaphors. Drawing on Plato and Plutarch, as well as contemporary studies led by Nussbaum (1993), I argue that a host of different metaphors was demonstrably used in the Greek tradition to describe philosophy and its subjects, led by the therapeutic or medicinal metaphor of philosophy as ‘therapy of desire’ or of desiderative opinion. I propose that it was the sophists like Protagoras, at least as they are depicted by Plato, who sought to conceive of philosophising as a strategic, warlike activity. In conclusion, I reflect on the invisibility of the medicinal metaphor, outside of certain dedicated studies in the history of ideas, in contemporary thinking about Western philosophy and its past.