Editorial: The Wisdom of Age

‘Philosophy’ means love of wisdom. So is philosophy primarily and rightly the province of those traditionally assumed to be wise, namely the old? Aristotle might have subscribed to some view of this sort. For him only those well on the way to middle age had the experience necessary to discourse sensibly on moral and political matters. Plato too, one suspects, would have agreed with something of the sort, albeit for different reasons. In The Republic education in wisdom just took an awful long time.So what of the younger thinker who, in a burst of revolutionary fervour, changes the course of the subject, figures such as Descartes, Nietzsche, Russell, Wittgenstein and Ayer, down to the Young Turks of recent decades? Over recent centuries young philosophers have contributed much to the subject, particularly as philosophy itself has become infatuated with mathematics and science. Could there be a connection? And did any of the young men of philosophy increase in wisdom as they got older? Nietzsche? Russell? Wittgenstein? Ayer?A cynic might suggest that in the past the very old were thought wise because there were so few of them. But now that the whole population is ageing, can we expect a renaissance of wisdom and a flowering of philosophy? And if not, is it because in the modern world the old characteristically ape the young? T.S. Eliot hinted at a more mundane reason when he asked not to be toldOf the Wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possessionOf belonging to another, or to others, or to God.Is this harsh observation of the narrowness of age as close to the truth as the conventional piety?

Humour and mundane reason about alcohol drinking1

Group discussions were conducted, in five different occupational categories, in a medium-sized Swedish town. The occupational areas were the media, politics, business, culture and the civil service. An analysis is presented of how the interviewees expressed their alcohol habits in serious speech as compared to humourous speech. The participants' statements concerning their own alcohol consumption are related to expressions of what are called modulations in systemic functional linguistics. These form part of the ideational component of language, which concerns the way we communicate experience. Our choice of modulations demonstrates our attitude to the conditions that we describe regulate our ability to act. In serious speech, the speakers tend to value cautious drinking, setting sharp limits to how and when the use of alcohol is appropriate. As regards humourous speech, however, the situation is to a large extent the opposite: the interviewees picture themselves as under external constraints in connection to alcohol. The issues where we find humour is also where we find controversy in serious speech. The differences of opinion that arise, concerning everyday habits and the role model one represents as a parent, give rise to a number of jokes. The parts of serious discource that concern other people display a very different content, having to do with drinking too much, not being able to handle one's liquor consumption and not being permitted to drink alcohol – a content reflected in humourous form when the interviewees talk about themselves.