There are different schools of Chinese philosophy that have differing approaches and conclusions, and even then sub-schools with differing beliefs within them (e.g. the Confucianist scholars Xun Zi and Mencius on the innate goodness of human nature). Saying that students should apply something as broadly and uselessly defined as "Chinese philosophy" into their lives is not particularly helpful, and sort of implicitly reinforces the stereotype that Chinese (or East Asian) people all adhere to this rigid, alien way of thinking.
Also, it's sort of condescending. No Western professor teaches Heidegger or Schopenhauer by breaking them up into easy-to-digest, feel-good aphorisms for better living.
> No Western professor teaches Heidegger or Schopenhauer by breaking them up into easy-to-digest, feel-good aphorisms for better living.
This is true, but there is comparable treatment in early Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, with multiple schools arguing very different things getting lumped together as if they are the same.
Not in my experience. My classical philosophy classes gave a little bit of mention to the pre-Socratics (with a chuckle at how crazy Pythagoras was) then it was on to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. We spent quite some time trying to suss out where Socrates ended and Plato began, and why he felt it necessary to use Socrates as his mouthpiece. We then looked at Aristotle's radical departure from Plato and tried to understand what motivated that.
We spent four months on that. Granted, it was a lower-level course, but I don't think I could say all Hellenistic philosophy gets lumped together when we spent so long just trying to pry the Socratics apart.
Hellenistic philosophy came after those guys; IIRC the biggest schools were the stoics and epicureans, with the peripatetics (following Aristotle) in third place. Plato got more influential in the later Roman empire, after Hellenistic times. So your comment kind of supports the grandparent's point (your "little bit of pre-Socratics" means the "early Greek" GP mentioned).
A cute bit for us computer nerds: Chrysippus pretty much invented boolean logic (in the Hellenistic period) and was considered the Father of Logic in antiquity. My intro philosophy course with a heavy emphasis on formal logic never mentioned any of this.
AFAIK, this is the reason for this - Plato established the academy, so his school became quite dominant. And since his works were effectively the textbook, they survived. After Plato, everyone's positions were defined relative to Plato's school, so it's easy to think that it's all based on Plato (and his teacher Socrates, and his student Aristotle).
It's like saying all Chinese philosophy is based on Confucius, (and to a lessor extent Daoism, and Chinese Buddhism). They became the official schools, so everyone thought of other philosophers as being relative to Confucius.
One of the interesting aspects of the Stoics though is that they were generally thought to derive from Spartan rather than Athenian tradition, which makes Plato as an apologist for Sparta (in Republic particularly) all the more interesting.
Also, it's sort of condescending. No Western professor teaches Heidegger or Schopenhauer by breaking them up into easy-to-digest, feel-good aphorisms for better living.
That doesn't seem like a reasonable presumption to me. You can't do justice to major belief systems even at a high level if you squeeze it into part of a course on a different topic.
Also, it's sort of condescending. No Western professor teaches Heidegger or Schopenhauer by breaking them up into easy-to-digest, feel-good aphorisms for better living.