There are two conditions I would want to see fulfilled by explanations of philosophy that would allow me to outmode reading older philosophers: That the explan

There are two conditions I would want to see fulfilled by explanations of philosophy that would allow me to outmode reading older philosophers: That the explanation adequately creates distinctions between the terms used by the philosopher and other such terms that are similar but must be distinguished. That the viewpoint of the philosopher is contextualized by the diff between various other viewpoints on the same issue. (Ian Hacking is a philosopher of statistics in science which is very good at this, and he didn't even have to invent statistics.) But oftentimes when the explainer caste of writers seeks to summarize philosophy, they do so in a way that focuses on the conclusions and takes for granted the presuppositions that had to be explored in order to reach those conclusions. When asking someone who has taken the summary to unpack each term in a sort of reverse-analysis, I think that they would have a difficult time because they didn't see the struggle that would have motivated the analysis in the first place. The author of the OP is correct that there is resistance that makes philosophical explanations less fungible than, say physics methods. It's because the terms used by philosophers are not mathematical in a way that can be easily copied. Instead they are the thing that constructs the semantics of terms which are eventually reified by mathematical syntax.