What is Philosophy?

The word is made of two Greek components. The meaning of the first is obvious.  Sophos means ‘wise’ and was applied to those who had wisdom (’sophist’). It is comparable to the Latin ‘sapiens’, and both may owe their origins to the Egyptian ‘sp’, which has a range of meanings, including ‘to teach’.
We got both the word ‘philosophy’, and the practice of the discipline, via Pythagoras, who flourished in the sixth century. Plato spent much of his life criticising the philosophers who came a...