In regards to Plato and Aristotle, they’re taught because they’re foundational. They provided the initial points and counterpoints to almost all, if not literally all, Philosophical fields, to the point many consider everything ever wrote by any Philosopher as comments for, against, or overcoming something either posited. Hence, if you don’t know them, and proceed to more recent Philosophers, you end up missing a lot of the context upon which their more modern arguments are based, as well as risk failing to understand the criticisms levied against these arguments which in turn are based on alternate update path tracking back to either Plato or Aristotle.
For an analogy then, we might say Plato and Aristotle correspond respectively to the arithmetic and geometry of Philosophy. And then Descartes to its algebra, Kant to its calculus, and Hegel to its hyperbolic geometries. Everything is built atop one or more of these five, and requires knowing their ideas to be properly understood, which is why one’s expected to have at least some familiarity, if not with all of them, with their core ideas, in this same order of relevance.
PS: “The Republic” isn’t a proposal for an actual system of government, it’s an analogy for the internal working of a person’s psyche according what was known at the time. It uses the analogy of the individual psyche as a city and of different public roles for different mental functions, somewhat akin to what the animated movie “Inside Out” did. If you’re interested in Plato’s actual political philosophy the book to read is “The Laws”, in which he discusses different systems of laws, with a particular focus on the pros, cons, and differences between the Athenian and Spartan systems, and considerations on how to construct sets of laws for polities.
Foundational means more than one thing. Platos writings may be foundational to the western tradition as it turned out, but that does not make them into something analogous to mathematical axioms that must ground ant possible version not philosophy.
I’m confused by this reply. I said that much in my first paragraph, and I provided the second as an analogy to better illustrate the first. I even said as much, informing at its opening it’s an analogy.
In any case, you draw an important point. Philosophy isn’t a set of axioms, and in fact doesn’t have one. Rather, it’s a set of problems. Philosophers, specially the major ones, ask questions no one asked before, and then try to answer them, in the process drawing even more questions. Since they’re usually the very first person to have asked that question, the answer they tentatively provide to their own question is a prototype solution, the very first attempt at solving a problem no one even knew was a problem until then, which usually makes of them bad answers. But irrespective of their answers being bad or (rarely) good, the questions themselves remain, continuously prompting new and more refined answers. Until, eventually, sometimes, an actual definite answer is reached. But that takes centuries, or even millennia.
Sometimes the Philosopher is running out of time and doesn’t even try to answer their questions, they just write them down for posterity. As in many other things, Aristotle is also the very first case of this. He wrote a book composed entirely of questions he was curious about but had no idea whatsoever how to answer. It took the development of the modern scientific method, itself based directly and indirectly on many of the ideas he developed, for those to begin being answered, and even so it still took the development of modern biology, and then that of the modern evolutionary synthesis, for many of those questions of his to be answered for real. I’ve seen an estimate that so far about 20% of this book was answered. Give it a few more centuries and the remaining 80% will be too. Probably.
So, it’s in this sense these five philosophers are foundational: in the proper sense of Philosophy being about the questions. Their questions build upon each other, prompting new tentative solutions, which in turn prompt new questions, and so on and so forth, in a process through which every new generation of philosophers and non-philosophers alike try all over again to answer them, both the old questions as well as the newly developed ones.
PS: By the way, it’d be extremely weird for anyone to consider Plato and Aristotle “axiomatic” given they provide diametrically opposed answers whenever they answer the same question. Whatever one affirms, the other denies, and the other way around. I doubt anyone would be able to draw, taking both together, any shared belief between them, much less any agreed-upon axiom.
In regards to Plato and Aristotle, they’re taught because they’re foundational. They provided the initial points and counterpoints to almost all, if not literally all, Philosophical fields, to the point many consider everything ever wrote by any Philosopher as comments for, against, or overcoming something either posited. Hence, if you don’t know them, and proceed to more recent Philosophers, you end up missing a lot of the context upon which their more modern arguments are based, as well as risk failing to understand the criticisms levied against these arguments which in turn are based on alternate update path tracking back to either Plato or Aristotle.
For an analogy then, we might say Plato and Aristotle correspond respectively to the arithmetic and geometry of Philosophy. And then Descartes to its algebra, Kant to its calculus, and Hegel to its hyperbolic geometries. Everything is built atop one or more of these five, and requires knowing their ideas to be properly understood, which is why one’s expected to have at least some familiarity, if not with all of them, with their core ideas, in this same order of relevance.
PS: “The Republic” isn’t a proposal for an actual system of government, it’s an analogy for the internal working of a person’s psyche according what was known at the time. It uses the analogy of the individual psyche as a city and of different public roles for different mental functions, somewhat akin to what the animated movie “Inside Out” did. If you’re interested in Plato’s actual political philosophy the book to read is “The Laws”, in which he discusses different systems of laws, with a particular focus on the pros, cons, and differences between the Athenian and Spartan systems, and considerations on how to construct sets of laws for polities.
As a footnote to your comment, there’s Scott Alexander’s Read History of Philosophy Backwards (example: What the Hell, Hegel?).
Foundational means more than one thing. Platos writings may be foundational to the western tradition as it turned out, but that does not make them into something analogous to mathematical axioms that must ground ant possible version not philosophy.
I’m confused by this reply. I said that much in my first paragraph, and I provided the second as an analogy to better illustrate the first. I even said as much, informing at its opening it’s an analogy.
In any case, you draw an important point. Philosophy isn’t a set of axioms, and in fact doesn’t have one. Rather, it’s a set of problems. Philosophers, specially the major ones, ask questions no one asked before, and then try to answer them, in the process drawing even more questions. Since they’re usually the very first person to have asked that question, the answer they tentatively provide to their own question is a prototype solution, the very first attempt at solving a problem no one even knew was a problem until then, which usually makes of them bad answers. But irrespective of their answers being bad or (rarely) good, the questions themselves remain, continuously prompting new and more refined answers. Until, eventually, sometimes, an actual definite answer is reached. But that takes centuries, or even millennia.
Sometimes the Philosopher is running out of time and doesn’t even try to answer their questions, they just write them down for posterity. As in many other things, Aristotle is also the very first case of this. He wrote a book composed entirely of questions he was curious about but had no idea whatsoever how to answer. It took the development of the modern scientific method, itself based directly and indirectly on many of the ideas he developed, for those to begin being answered, and even so it still took the development of modern biology, and then that of the modern evolutionary synthesis, for many of those questions of his to be answered for real. I’ve seen an estimate that so far about 20% of this book was answered. Give it a few more centuries and the remaining 80% will be too. Probably.
So, it’s in this sense these five philosophers are foundational: in the proper sense of Philosophy being about the questions. Their questions build upon each other, prompting new tentative solutions, which in turn prompt new questions, and so on and so forth, in a process through which every new generation of philosophers and non-philosophers alike try all over again to answer them, both the old questions as well as the newly developed ones.
PS: By the way, it’d be extremely weird for anyone to consider Plato and Aristotle “axiomatic” given they provide diametrically opposed answers whenever they answer the same question. Whatever one affirms, the other denies, and the other way around. I doubt anyone would be able to draw, taking both together, any shared belief between them, much less any agreed-upon axiom.