It’s not always taught this way. Shelly Kagan, a philosophy professor at Yale, has a tendency to teach those Y’s without teaching about X first, which you can see since some of his courses are available online.
This is actually pretty standard in certain courses, like logic and ethics, where we have a better idea of what theories we want to teach. Actually, I learned fewer history/names in philosophical logic than in most math courses.
It’s also a subject of some controversy. For a while it was common to use textbooks that tended in the direction of teaching the ideas. But a lot of folks favor original works, especially since part of the point of Philosophy is being able to pick up a work by Plato and reason about it for yourself.
It’s not always taught this way. Shelly Kagan, a philosophy professor at Yale, has a tendency to teach those Y’s without teaching about X first, which you can see since some of his courses are available online.
This is actually pretty standard in certain courses, like logic and ethics, where we have a better idea of what theories we want to teach. Actually, I learned fewer history/names in philosophical logic than in most math courses.
It’s also a subject of some controversy. For a while it was common to use textbooks that tended in the direction of teaching the ideas. But a lot of folks favor original works, especially since part of the point of Philosophy is being able to pick up a work by Plato and reason about it for yourself.