Logos

Logos (UK: /ˈloʊɡɒs, ˈlɒɡɒs/, US: /ˈloʊɡoʊs/; Ancient Greek: λόγος, romanized: lógos, lit. 'word, discourse, or reason') is a term used in Western philosophy, psychology and rhetoric, as well as religion (notably Christianity); among its connotations is that of a rational form of discourse that relies on inductive and deductive reasoning.

Aristotle first systematized the usage of the word, making it one of the three principles of rhetoric alongside ethos and pathos. This original use identifies the word closely to the structure and content of language or text. Both Plato and Aristotle used the term logos (along with rhema) to refer to sentences and propositions.

Ancient Greek: λόγος, romanized: lógos, lit. 'word, discourse, or reason' is related to Ancient Greek: λέγω, romanized: légō, lit. 'I say' which is cognate with Latin: lex, lit. 'law'. The word derives from a Proto-Indo-European root, *leǵ-, which can have the meanings "I put in order, arrange, gather, choose, count, reckon, discern, say, speak". In modern usage, it typically connotes the verbs "account", "measure", "reason" or "discourse". It is occasionally used in other contexts, such as for "ratio" in mathematics.

Logos became a technical term in Western philosophy beginning with Heraclitus (c. 535 – c.  475 BC), who used the term for a principle of order and knowledge. Ancient Greek philosophers used the term in different ways. The sophists used the term to mean "discourse". Aristotle applied the term to refer to "reasoned discourse" or "the argument" in the field of rhetoric, and considered it one of the three modes of persuasion alongside ethos and pathos. Pyrrhonist philosophers used the term to refer to dogmatic accounts of non-evident matters. The Stoics spoke of the logos spermatikos (the generative principle of the Universe) which foreshadows related concepts in Neoplatonism.

Within Hellenistic Judaism, Philo (c. 20 BC – c.  50 AD) integrated the term into Jewish philosophy. Philo distinguished between logos prophorikos ("the utterer word or speaker"), logos spermatikos ("the speech") and the logos endiathetos ("the word remaining within").

The Gospel of John identifies the Christian Logos, through which all things are made, as divine (theos), and further identifies Jesus Christ as the incarnate Logos. Early translators of the Greek New Testament, such as Jerome (in the 4th century AD), experienced frustration with the inadequacy of any single Latin word to convey the meaning of the word logos as used to describe Jesus Christ in the Gospel of John. The Vulgate Bible usage of in principio erat verbum was thus constrained to use the (perhaps inadequate) noun verbum for "word"; later Romance language translations had the advantage of nouns such as le Verbe in French. Reformation translators took another approach. Martin Luther rejected Zeitwort (verb) in favor of Wort (word), for instance, although later commentators repeatedly turned to a more dynamic use involving the living word as used by Jerome and Augustine. The term is also used in Sufism, and the analytical psychology of Carl Jung.

Despite the conventional translation as "word", logos is not used for a word in the grammatical sense—for that, the term lexis (λέξις, léxis) was used. However, both logos and lexis derive from the same verb légō (λέγω), meaning "(I) count, tell, say, speak".

In the ancient Greek context, the term logos in the sense of "word" or "discourse" also contrasted with mythos (Ancient Greek: μῦθος). Classical Greek usage sees reasoned argument (logos) as distinct from imaginative tales (mythos).