Logos

From Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium

	Main Article	Talk	Related Articles  [?]	Bibliography  [?]	External Links  [?]
	This is a draft article, under development and not meant to be cited but you can help to improve it. These unapproved articles are subject to a disclaimer. [edit intro]

λόγος or logos is a word in Greek, used in ancient Athens by philosophers, poets and rhetoriticians which has taken on an important role in Western philosophy. It broadly means 'word', but also means a thought, speech or reason. It is the root for logic, and the suffix -ology (as in psychology, philology, theology and so on).

Heraclitus used λόγος to refer to discourse and Aristotle uses it to refer to rational discourse.

The Gospel of John starts "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."^[1] The use of 'Word' there is from the Greek λογος, and is usually understood to mean Jesus - λογος is used to describe Jesus later in the chapter (1:14-17).

The religious author Karen Armstrong pairs logos and mythos (myth) as concepts to describe trends and practices in religion, and is of the opinion that Western religion is too bound up with the logos and not in touch with the mythos strand, and that not keeping the two approaches in harmony can lead to fundamentalism.

References

1. ↑ "εν αρχη ην ο λογος και ο λογος ην προς τον θεον και θεος ην ο λογος"