Disambiguation
I lied. There can never be enough etymological posts.
Since falling down a Wikipedia hole seems to be my fate this evening, I’ll borrow one of the site’s oft-used terms for my purposes.
When a word has more than one meaning, but more than a homonym, more like the word/term could be referring to a number of different things, Wikipedia has a page that suggests the result they think you’re most likely looking for and then helps to clear up the ambiguity by suggesting other pages that descrive alternate associations for that word or phrases that include that word/term to describe other things.
When I googled ‘peripatetic’, the first non-dictionary, first Wikipedia result was for the Peripatetic school. No disambiguation suggested, which is why I feel the need to pick up the slack here.
One could argue that my modern use of the term stretches the boundaries of the traditional definitions. While ‘pedestrian’ or ‘itinerant’, ‘given to walking’ or ‘waking from place to place’ are among the definitions, my understanding of ‘one who walks’, is a little harder to find in the search results.
Certainly the classical origin of the word encompassed a more specific understanding of walking.
The Peripatetic school was a school of philosophy in Ancient Greece headed by Aristotle. Peripatetic is an adjective given to his followers.
But it’s in the original Greek that we find my preferred definition for the term:
“The term "Peripatetic" is a transliteration of the ancient Greek word περιπατητικός (peripatētikós), which means "of walking" or "given to walking about".
“The Peripatetic school, founded by Aristotle,[2] was actually known simply as the Peripatos.[3] Aristotle's school came to be so named because of the peripatoi ("walkways", some covered or with colonnades) of the Lyceum where the members met.[4] The legend that the name came from Aristotle's alleged habit of walking while lecturing may have started with Hermippus of Smyrna.[5]”
Long story short: Aristotle wasn’t a citizen of Athens, couldn’t own property and therefore couldn’t set up a brick-and-mortar school, so he and his students walked about a local temple, the Lyceum.
An undergraduate degree in the classics made me very tickled to realize that ancient Greece, philosophy and walking could all be combined into one marvelously multi-syllabic word. I could not resist.
A study of Aristotelian philosophy (aka proto-science) might no longer be my focus, but I like to think his followers would appreciate my plans to investigate the intersection of walking and philosophy.
Frederic Gros’ A Philosophy of Walking is currently making its way through various nations plague-beleaguered postal systems. But I’ve got plenty to read in the meantime.