Modern academia doesn't even descend from any ancient Greek institution since schooling in Greco-Roman antiquity was far more of a personal engagement, universi

Modern academia doesn't even descend from any ancient Greek institution since schooling in Greco-Roman antiquity was far more of a personal engagement, universities were extensions of Christian monasteries and modern formal logic and 'rational debate' developed out of the practices of those monks communications with one another across distances. Moreover it was the Muslim Caliphates and Eastern Romans who inherited and further developed the wealth of surviving antique knowledge between the end of the Roman Empire in Western Europe and Northwest Africa and the renaissance, but since Hegel Europe has had this lasting fascination with a direct link to antiquity. Edit: An aside - People of Descartes' and Locke's generation were amongst the first waves of a secular break of this sacred academic tradition that was commensurate with similar breaks in politics. It is this sacred origin of secular thought that John Locke is referring to in The Essay on Human Understanding in the form of "the schoolmen" he references as his constant opponent: these are the Christian scholastics, from Peter Abelard down to Aquinas, who developed the prototypical notions of universality/causation as we understand them today, but these were conflated things from the scholastics all the way down to Kant rather than how we now consider the former distinctly as an exhaustive, inclusive set of things in some category, e.g. being human. The categorical imperative doesn't mean "act as if everybody else had to also do as you do", it means "act as if your decision was inextricable from any other necessary, causal law we observe of nature, like gravity (does the Earth decide to pull you back down when you jump up?). Morality based on pain/pleasure is a BIG NO-NO for Kant and Kant's minimalist definition of being human excludes being able to be recognized empathically/sympathetically.