  The word ‘analysis’ derives from the ancient Greek term  ‘analusis’. The prefix  ‘ana’ means ‘up’, and  ‘lusis’ means ‘loosing’,  ‘release’ or ‘separation’, so that  ‘analusis’ means ‘loosening up’ or  ‘dissolution’. The term was readily extended to the  solving or dissolving of a problem, and it was in this sense that it  was employed in ancient Greek geometry and philosophy. The method of  analysis that was developed in ancient Greek geometry had an  influence on both Plato and Aristotle. Also important, however, was  the influence of Socrates's concern with definition, in which  the roots of modern conceptual analysis can be found. What we have in ancient Greek thought, then, is a complex web of methodologies, of  which the most important are Socratic definition, which Plato  elaborated into his method of division, his related method of  hypothesis, which drew on geometrical analysis, and the method(s)  that Aristotle developed in his Analytics. Far from a  consensus having established itself over the last two millennia, the  relationships between these methodologies are the subject of  increasing debate today. At the heart of all of them, too, lie the  philosophical problems raised by Meno's paradox, which  anticipates what we now know as the paradox of analysis, concerning  how an analysis can be both correct and informative (see the  supplementary section on   Moore),  and Plato's attempt to solve it through the theory of  recollection, which has spawned a vast literature on its own.