I'm defining philosophy very broadly as written, systematic knowledge in the West. All major branches of knowledge where once subsumed by the title "philosophy". For instance, what we know of as science was previously called "natural philosophy". What we now know as "political theory" was once indistinguishable from "philosophy". And political science is a combination of the latter forms of the two. It began with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium_(education)
Meh. By that definition, what we now know know as philosophy is not what used to be philosophy. By the same tack, I could define "hot dogs" as all written, systematic knowledge in the West, and thus claim that hot dogs predated all intellectual pursuits.
