They invented the concept of philosophy to designate the whole endeavor of making sense of all aspects of existence. Their view of reason rested in the creation of concepts using the deductive method operating on the data provided by the senses as its basic material, and then reasoning further from this conceptual base. But the ancient Greeks were perhaps the first to explicitly ask: Is the world (of which we are also a part) intelligible? And if so, how? They answered in the affirmative through the human capacity to reason. Human curiosity and the compulsion to ask questions has always existed. Since the ancient Greeks discovered many of the ideas of logic, math, and geometry that are often associated with classical ideas of philosophy, it behooves us to ask what they meant by it. But modern usage of the term is much broader than this rather academic division. The easiest clue to indicate which of these philosophies is being referred to by the word philosophy is to note the language used. This modern-day division of analytic and continental philosophy (confined largely to academia) is problematic for understanding the current use of the word, philosophy since both of these two areas talk of philosophy in general but are often only referring to that school. In the contemporary English-speaking world it is often used implicitly to refer only to analytic philosophy and, on the other hand, in non-English speaking countries, it often refers implicitly only to continental philosophy. The answer to the question "what is philosophy?", has almost as many varieties as there are philosophers. It can be construed then either as the love of wisdom or the wisdom of love. The word philosophy comes from the ancient Greek words philo-, to love or to befriend, and, -sophia, to be wise. The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787) depicts the philosopher Socrates carrying out his own execution.
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