(Wikimedia Commons, 2026)
Literacy emerged in Sumeria roughly 5500 years ago, but the emergence of philosophy in ancient Greece roughly 2500 years ago seems to have been closely bound up with the emergence of the first alphabetic writing-&-reading system there in the 8th century BCE (Rayner et al., 2012: ch. 2). Certainly, in the 6th century BCE, the emergence of logic with Parmenides, Zeno, Plato, and Aristotle, and the more less simultaneous emergence of mathematics with the Pythagoreans and Euclid, as formal sciences, both require not only literacy but also alphabetic writing-&-reading and its specific grammar or syntax and semantics. And logic and mathematics—alongside various forms of naturalistic investigation and speculation (principally cosmological/physical or biological), various forms of religion and spirituality (principally existential/mystical or theological), and various forms of rule-governed conduct and sociality (principally ethical, moral, or political)—are the core ingredients of the emergent discipline of philosophy. But neither logic, nor mathematics, nor philosophy would be possible without the act or process of reading; and since writing presupposes reading—in order to write something, you have to be able to read what you’re writing—then reading is really the condition of the possibility of all philosophy, in the sense that reading is not only necessary but also essential to philosophy. Indeed, the philosophy of reading is first philosophy (Hanna, 2023a). Therefore, philosophy isn’t merely “the love of wisdom” (in Greek, philo + sophia), it’s fundamentally the love of wisdom that can be expressed in legible texts and read by oneself and others. That all being so, then one would naturally expect there to be important analogies or even isomorphisms between, on the one hand, the internal structure of the act or process of reading, and on the other, the internal structure of philosophizing. And that’s precisely what Robert Hanna investigates in “The Internal Structure of Reading and the Internal Structure of Philosophizing.”
REFERENCE
(Wikimedia Commons, 2026). Wikimedia Commons. “ ‘A Philosopher Reading,’ by a follower of David Teniers the Younger, 1610-1690.” Available online HERE.
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