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He did not invent the word. In the funeral oration for example Thucydides has Pericles refer to the Athenians as a philosophizing people:

Philokaloumen te gar met ' euteleias kai philosophoumen aneu malakias.

Plato was probably the first to use the term in a technical sense, to refer to someone who spends his life as a 'professional' philosopher.

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And of course Herodotus refers to Solon as a lover of wisdom in his Histories.

Considering my user name I guess I should have led with that reference.

Hmm - I had no idea. I came across the distinction (philosophy/sophism) in Plato's work. I had the feeling that Sophism continued to be the normal term, without its modern pejorative sound, until the advent of christianity as the dominant ideology of the roman empire- certainly, I think the idea of philosophy as the love of (divine) wisdom is a sort of curtailment of the whole project, really only favourable to Platonists, Christians, or I guess Parimedeans- so I thought it's the kind of thing that Plato (and his school) would have put about.

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