Academic philosophy differs from science in that it seems to place much higher value on the personalities and the original works relative to the ideas. When I studied physics at university we didn't learn physics from the original works or papers of the pioneering scientists. Newton is rightly recognized for his huge contribution to physics but no physics course will use the Principia to teach mechanics. The core ideas have been refined and are now presented in ways that are easier for students to grasp, without extraneous or incorrect extra detail present in the original works or problems of language.

When I studied philosophy at university however, great import was placed on reading the original texts from great philosophers. In many cases reading these works I was struck by the amount of confused and wrong ideas and the lack of clarity of presentation - Descartes is a prime example. It seemed to me at the time that if philosophy was the pursuit of truth in any sense then it would be better served by a model of instruction more like science: where the key ideas are presented in a refined and clarified modern text. My experience of academic philosophy was that it couldn't quite decide if it wanted to be science or literary criticism.