This is like saying "Why bother studying Newton? He didn't even know about relativity!" You study Newton because it's a simple model and motivates what comes after.
Physics is an empirical science with a rather neutral language to communicate its content. Arguments (much more 'findings') can be translated to this language and be understood on their own.
The language of philosophy isn't so clear (or it is, but everyone has their own). Therefore an argument might not be fully understood on its own. The author/ philosopher might have tried to do so, but eventually it is easier to understand an arguments if you know what the state of the art was back then.
My point basically is, that this goes beyond 'motivation' - which is hard to illustrate if we look at physics for comparison.
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Unrelated: What's better: "My point basically is, [...]" or "My point is basically, [...]". If I knew how to ask this, I'd google it.
Not my cup of tea, but worth taking a look at.
I agree. As I've just stated in another comment, it's hard to say something with substance about philosophy in general. There are just a lot of different fields with individual axioms and scientific methods.
That said, if these 'languages and meta-languages' fields would have found something viable (usage and usability), eg. a good tool to use, we would already use it.
I dont' have the paper but i found this [0] which might refer to the paper i read.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332781241_Developin...
I agree, but it should be taken into account that much of philosophy is based on science (namely psychology/sociology) and a lot of ideas are discarded if they're missing some morsel of empirical evidence.
[I overlooked the "much of" in your first sentence. This would have been my reply:
Yes with limitations. As I implied there are more kind of sciences. Philosophy itself has very diverse fields which have their own sets of scientific methods. So it's hard to say something with substance about the general field of philosophy.
The philosophy I was talking about is more compared to math than empirical evidence based sciences.]
“Physics is not taught or practiced by reading and interpreting Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis, Geometry is not done by studying Euclid’s Elements, and so on”
I'm not sure this follows, though nor can I think of any counterexamples where it is uncontroversially absolutely useless to study the history of a useful subject. But I think that one can, e.g., be a successful professional mathematician without being much interested in the history of mathematics.
Our thinking is unconsciously molded by philosophers that died hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
A point that I'd try to put some light on, is that, among many dangers, we can get lost in false worldviews that trap our consciousness in apparently true realities that are ultimately false by a delicate house of cards/lies/mistakes.
The Matrix, or more appropriately, Plato's Cave, made that point infinitely better than I could ever do.
That's exactly what the people in Plato's Cave did.
How ironic is that?