If you read the story of the Scientific Revolution, the major difficulty seemed to be overthrowing the deep-seated influence of ancient thinkers, and learning t

If you read the story of the Scientific Revolution, the major difficulty seemed to be overthrowing the deep-seated influence of ancient thinkers, and learning to think for themselves rather than comment endless on Aristotle, Archimedes, Cicero, etc. It's not clear academic philosophy ever really moved past this inclination—a kind of perpetual scholasticism hangs over it, at least as commonly taught. The philosophical curriculum is what it is because—well, tradition; because that's what the teachers learned. You can stretch it to have something to do with the present, or to incorporate everything humanity has come to know to be true since then, but it seems to default to something closer to historiography than anything like what these writers were doing when they wrote in the first place. (Just venting my grievance.)