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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 maybe there's another explanation?



Two contributers I can think of

1. Being able to tease apart language from ideas can't be 'taught' you have to do it

2. People disagree much more in philosophy than math




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