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Not in my experience. My classical philosophy classes gave a little bit of mention to the pre-Socratics (with a chuckle at how crazy Pythagoras was) then it wa

Not in my experience. My classical philosophy classes gave a little bit of mention to the pre-Socratics (with a chuckle at how crazy Pythagoras was) then it was on to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. We spent quite some time trying to suss out where Socrates ended and Plato began, and why he felt it necessary to use Socrates as his mouthpiece. We then looked at Aristotle's radical departure from Plato and tried to understand what motivated that. We spent four months on that. Granted, it was a lower-level course, but I don't think I could say all Hellenistic philosophy gets lumped together when we spent so long just trying to pry the Socratics apart.

abecedarius 13y ago
Hellenistic philosophy came after those guys; IIRC the biggest schools were the stoics and epicureans, with the peripatetics (following Aristotle) in third place. Plato got more influential in the later Roman empire, after Hellenistic times. So your comment kind of supports the grandparent's point (your "little bit of pre-Socratics" means the "early Greek" GP mentioned). A cute bit for us computer nerds: Chrysippus pretty much invented boolean logic (in the Hellenistic period) and was considered the Father of Logic in antiquity. My intro philosophy course with a heavy emphasis on formal logic never mentioned any of this.