I don't think it's all that bold. If earlier people had invented philosophy, then those are the people we'd be celebrating. The Greeks would have celebrated the

I don't think it's all that bold. If earlier people had invented philosophy, then those are the people we'd be celebrating. The Greeks would have celebrated them. Before the Greeks, there was this giant wall at which you had to stop, we call them 'mystery religions' because that's what they all had at the heart of them, this immense wonder about 'what it's all for', that they couldn't help but attribute to whatever god they had concocted up. After the Greeks, humanity had tools to investigate that mystery rationally. Today we call those tools philosophy. If you go look at the culture of the ancient Egyptians, long in the tooth by the time the Greeks came around, you don't see anything like Greek rationalism. Their thoughts are circular, their reasoning hung up around their mystery religion, never to escape it. The Egyptians had 5000 years to invent philosophy but they never did.