As we have seen, philosophy was one of the major contributions of Greek Civilization. It was the Greeks who gave it its first major impetus as well as its name, "the love of learning." This very phrase embodies the most important aspects of their contribution to the West: the love of the best or most excellent; the search for something beyond a description of immediate experience; and the attempt to grasp, in some comprehensive fashion, both the actual and the ideal, both the given and the possible. In order to accomplish this task philosophy has, as we have seen, traditionally included the following major subdivisions: epistemology, the study of how we know; logic, the study of how we think; ethics, the study of how we act; aesthetics, the study of what we enjoy; and metaphysics, the study of what is real. [excerpt]
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Bloom, Robert L. et al. "Pt. XXII: Philosophical Meaning." Ideas and Institutions of Western Man (Gettysburg College, 1958), 1-6.