This is interesting: They’re asking over at Daily Nous what one statement/question/passage from Western philosophy would you preserve if all of the rest of philosophical thought were to be removed from the earth?
Resetting, or jump-starting, Western thought is an idea that has been around for a while; the need for that is the aim of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and John Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy. Rightly so, too. Western thought is derived chiefly from Plato who, taking his cue from mathematics, taught that our world is a poor copy of a perfect, ideal world somewhere else. Layer-on Original Sin to explain why that other world is inaccessible to us, and you’ve got Christianity. The West has reached the dead-end of Plato’s thought.
I need to think about it, but my first thought is the challenge posed by Socrates in Euthyphro:
Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?