You're somehow conflating learning the history of your own field to being self-obsessed. Almost all of social science and humanities education starts with a history introduction - the origin of ideas, the development of the field, etc. Is literature self-obsessed too, because they read Homer? Your analogy with phlogiston completely fails, and not just for that, but because revisiting ancient philosophical ideas is not the same as reconsidering outdated scientific theories. Your source of misunderstanding is captured in your criticism that philosophers are incapable of
>abandoning philosophies long disproved
If you think philosophy can be proved or disproved, then you don't get it. Philosophy produces arguments, and some of those may be stronger than others, but there is very little in philosophy with unanimous agreement. I think _your_ ignorance, ironically, is what makes you believe that certain ideas are ignorant. For example, here you say that philosophers
>can't teach you about Descartes' epistemology without also getting into his ignorant dualism
I say this as a non-dualist - the debate on the philosophy of mind is far from "proved" or "disproved", and moreover your suggestion that Descartes' dualism should somehow be removed from the curriculum is ridiculous. The point is that philosophy students have the opportunity to debate and think about this stuff, rather than just accepting it as dogma. So even if we were to reject an idea entirely we'd still teach it to new students. (Not to mention that separating Descartes' epistemology from his metaphysics would be a terrible pedagogical idea.)
But what's even more bizarre about your comment is that all of this is pretty much irrelevant because in actual philosophy education and literature today the kind of ancient ideas you're attacking are never the core stuff. They might be used as intro or historical material but you're exaggerating the extent to which they take up the curriculum. The whole thing is a strawman to be honest from someone who I doubt has ever studied philosophy in a university.