Sketch of the history of social contexts of Greek philosophy:

1. Philosophy emerges from the confrontational political and legal practices of the archaic polis in the bustling trading city of Miletus

2. People begin to realise that philosophising is a new way to show how much better you are than your fellow citizens. Xenophanes can shut up about his monotheism long enough to sing for a symposium (though the poem still exhibits his own unusal stress on ethical purity), but

Heraclitus and Parmenides just have no time for anyone else.

3. Pythagoreanism emerges as a mystery cult and brotherhood, perhaps partly in response to the relentless publicness of the polis. It's secretive and hostile to polis life, and develops a sinister web of influence in the West (where the polis is least developed).

4. Schools of physicians emerge, basically functioning as guilds, i.e. to secure their own interests and semi-institutionalise teaching

5. After the Persians are repelled, Athens is dominant and can act as a Hellenic hub of intellectual activity. The highborn want a new kind of education to help them best exploit democracy, whence the Sophists.

6. With the strains of the Peloponnesian War, democracy turns on innovating intellectuals for being subversive elements.

7. After the Peloponnesian War, philosophers like Plato and Isocrates stay out of the public eye, founding schools that draw on the Pythagorean and Hippocratic precedents, as well as the precedents of Heraclitus and Parmenides to champion philosophy, but now as cope.

8. With the Lyceum under Aristotle, the memory of the C4th is slipping, and so philosophy is less an exercise in cope. The Lyceum is more fully a research institution, having an existence independent of cope and that the absence of which generates the cope.

9. After Alexander, the polis is over. Cope is back, big time. The "refugee philosophies" of Epicureanism and Stoicism are cope for the demise of a world in which activity is meaningful.

10. The Ptolemies make a load of scientists their bitches, attracting them and making them depend on patronage. Sad sacks get locked up in nerdy research institutions.

Conclusion: the philosophical ideal of the life of speculation was first arrogance, then cope, then castration.

The Lyceum under Aristotle and Theophrastus escapes this best, for the same reasons that they, but not Plato, undertook detailed investigations into the things populating the sublunary sphere