I've been interested for awhile in a distinction between math and philosophy here. Just descriptively speaking, we don't tend to teach math from original source (at least, not well-established math like you'd see in high school and early college). We don't teach calculus out of Newton/Leibniz/Cauchy/etc, we don't teach Fourier analysis out of Fourier, etc. Maybe geometry students will work from the Elements, but I certainly didn't.
But in philosophy, students do read everyone from Plato to Rawls in the original. There are (lots of) supplementary texts, of course, but they're companions.
I think that shows an interesting divide that the way we actually think about philosophy is not just a catalogue of arguments and positions one could take, but that the famous works are things worth reading unto themselves. There are a few math papers like that ("God Created the Integers" tries to anthologize them) but they are the exception rather than the rule.
But in philosophy, students do read everyone from Plato to Rawls in the original. There are (lots of) supplementary texts, of course, but they're companions.
I think that shows an interesting divide that the way we actually think about philosophy is not just a catalogue of arguments and positions one could take, but that the famous works are things worth reading unto themselves. There are a few math papers like that ("God Created the Integers" tries to anthologize them) but they are the exception rather than the rule.
But maybe there's another explanation?