Continental Philosophy Society

What is Wisdom?
This will begin as a collection of resources on wisdom.

Heraclitus
Modified to better reflect Greek

(B32) The wise is one only. It is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus.
ἓν τὸ σοφὸν µοῦνον λέγεσθαι οὐκ ἐθέλει καὶ ἐθέλει Ζηνὸς ὄνοµα. 

(B35) Men that love wisdom must be acquainted with very many things indeed.
χρὴ γὰρ εὖ µάλα πολλῶν ἵστορας φιλοσόφους ἄνδρας εἶναι καθʹ Ἡράκλειτον.

(B41) Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the thought by which all things are steered through all things
εἶναι γὰρ ἓν τὸ σοφόν, ἐπίστασθαι γνώµην, ὁτέη ἐκυϐέρνησε πάντα διὰ πάντων.

(B50) It is wise to hearken, not to me, but to my Word, and to confess that all things are one.
οὐκ ἐµοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁµολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναι»

(B78) The way of man has no wisdom (γνώμας), but that of the gods has.

(B108) Of all whose discourses I have heard, there is not one who attains to understanding that wisdom is apart from all.
Ἡρακλείτου. ὁκόσων λόγους ἤκουσα, οὐδεὶς ἀφικνεῖται ἐς τοῦτο, ὥστε γινώσκειν ὅτι σοφόν ἐστι πάντων κεχωρισµένον.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wisdom/
This primarily follows Socrates trying to puzzle out why an oracle calls Socrates the wisest person. Two common interpretations are that Socrates investigations show wisdom to be either epistemic humility or epistemic accuracy.

On Pythagoras
Diogenes Laertius holds that Pythagoras was the first to use the word philosophia (love of wisdom).

A quick search for philosophia on the Perseus project brings up this.

Pythagoras called the principles he taught philosophia or love of wisdom, but not sophia or wisdom. For he criticized the Seven Wise Men, as they were called, who lived before his time, saying that no man is wise, being human, and many a time, by reason of the weakness of his nature, has not the strength to bring all matters to a successful issue, but that he who emulates both the ways and the manner of life of a wise man may more fittingly be called a "lover of wisdom."

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0084:book=10:chapter=10&highlight=philosophia
Look at the Greek translation on the side and you will find the word φιλοσοφία

To back this up, here is a definition from the Perseus Project:

φιλόσοφος
I.a lover of wisdom, first used by Pythagoras, who called himself φιλόσοφος a lover of wisdom, not σοφός, a sage, Cic.: then in a wide sense of scientific men, learned men, Plat., etc.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=fi%5Elo%2Fsofos&la=greek&can=fi%5Elo%2Fsofos0&prior=filosofi/a#lexicon

Buddhism
Meditation provides a foundation for wisdom. Wisdom is intrinsically valuable in Buddhism, and guides practise. Wisdom is seeing things how they are. For example earth as earth, body as body, mind as mind, feelings as feelings.
(In a discussion with a venerable monastic, we realised that this is what secular meditation lacks, a goal of wisdom)

Questions: Why is wisdom not fundamentally revealed to us? Why do we have to seek wisdom?

A collection of many translations, providing comment on the purpose of each. https://www.ontology.co/biblio/parmenides-editions.htm

Xavier and I are both using a David Gallop Translation.

Here is a quote from the preface.

Richard Robinson, in the introduction to his translation of Aristotle's Politics Ill-IV (Oxford 1962, p. XXX), has characterized a translation as 'a shameful form of book.' For by offering a translation of each sentence in his original, the translator 'implies that he knows that this is what the original sentence means. But sometimes he does not know what it means, and is only guessing as well as he can.' In publishing a fresh version of Parmenides' poem the present translator makes no claim to know what every sentence in the original means. To signal the worst uncertainties, alternative renderings have been appended for passages whose meaning is disputed, or where major questions of interpretation hinge upon the text or translation adopted. In these places the reader will find it instructive to compare alternatives. He will then quickly discover how completely he puts himself at the translator's mercy, if he relies entirely upon any single version. He may also find it useful, especially if he is wholly dependent upon translation, to consult the short glossary of terms that present special problems of translation or interpretation.

(Again, it seems like the gold standard translation, Diels-Kranz, is in German)

Ruell and I have gone through the preface, introduction and first pages of the body of Sickness Unto Death. The aim has been to find a starting point for examining Soren Kierkegaard's thought as a whole, and not simply to examine the subject matter of Sickness Unto Death.

On faith

he gained a courage that the natural
man does not know, and he gained this courage by learning
to fear something even more horrifying

(Introduction, p8 )

I use this as evidence for seeing the phenomenon of faith as being intrinsically related to (spiritual) endurance. Faith allows one to 'bear'.
An example I came across recently is Desmond Doss, combat medic in world war two, whose great faith enabled him to endure death and despair on the battlefield in a way that his fellow soldiers could not.
There is Miguel de Y Unamo, whose faith was a bulwark against the winds of chaos. (There is more to say on Existentialism and faith. I think what is key is that the Church failed, however the Church does not have a monopoly on faith. The church is subsumed under faith, not faith under the church.
What is Heidegger's relationship to faith? What does it mean when he says 'only God can save us now'? I do not think this has a simple answer. I do not feel qualified to explore this. Xavier perhaps you can say more.)

I see faith as the ability to 'bear' even in people I have met. Those who have faith as part of their self identity do not suffer Nihilism to the same degree as those who build their self identity on other grounds. I see this in myself; that is in comparing when I did not build my self identity on faith, to when I did build my self identity on faith.

I do not have extensive knowledge of Christianity, yet Ruell has been able to help me get a hold on the Christian elements of Soren Kierkegaard (Christianity is his core, or at the very least is the core of the pseudonymous author of Sickness Unto Death Anti-climacus). I found it valuable to unpack the story of Lazarus, and what this means for the concept of death. I can perhaps try and unpack some of my understanding of Death in Sickness Unto Death below. After all, death is in the title of the work.

I was wondering if we could share the most accurate translations of Parmenides that we could find.

Thus far:
http://philoctetes.free.fr/parmenides.htm

P.S Section 44 of Being and Time interprets Parmenidies

Parmenides was the first to discover the Being of entities, and he 'identified'
Being with the perceptive understanding of Being: ... τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι.
(For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.)

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