To me that's akin to saying you don't need to understand the history of physics because hey:
F = ma
Is all you need. I mean sure? But then we have a different concept of what "understanding" something means.
The idea that you can ignore history and have some sort objective summary of it is, to me, verging on cargo cult science — the opposite of what scientific (and philosophical) education should be.
> akin to saying you don't need to understand the history of physics
I must have expressed myself badly. I think it's necessary to understand the history of philosophy. I think it's mostly history. Is post-modernism history yet?
Well, unless you are an actual historian (or an academic philosopher), you aren't usually qualified to trace the threads of thought development through time, and across continents and language barriers.
As it happens, the philosophers I focused on for my BA[0] were Nietsche and Wittgenstein. In both cases I read all their published work; then read many commentaries and books on each; then re-read the base works (all in English of course - I had only conversational German).
But I was doing a degree; I had to read all of Nietsche, because I was writing a paper on him. It's perfectly OK to approach the work of philosophers through the commentaries (although it's a shame not to read the base texts[1]).
[0] I scraped a pass. Nietsche wasn't a popular topic where I studied.
[1] Postmodernism crashed in after I studied, so I missed that boat. From what I've read, I wouldn't include that in my remark about base texts)
F = ma
Is all you need. I mean sure? But then we have a different concept of what "understanding" something means.
The idea that you can ignore history and have some sort objective summary of it is, to me, verging on cargo cult science — the opposite of what scientific (and philosophical) education should be.