system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why did Plato/Aristotle come along when they did? Why not sooner? And how much self-awareness did they have about being the "Fathers of Western Philosophy?"

Why did Plato/Aristotle come along when they did? Why not sooner? (It seems random that they just decided to create Western philosophy right there; why didn't it happen much earlier? Or much later?) 

And how much self-awareness did they have about being the "Fathers of Western Philosophy?"
gpt
>Why did Plato/Aristotle come along when they did? Why not sooner? 

There were plenty of philosophers predating Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece. Socrates was the most famous but there are many others, collectively known as the pre-Socratics. There are also many pre-Plato philosophers in other cultures.

>It seems random that they just decided to create Western philosophy right there; why didn't it happen much earlier? Or much later?

Plato and Aristotle did not create Western philosophy alone. They were both substantially influenced by predecessors, and what they contributed to was not Western philosophy, but rather ancient Greek philosophy, which later became (among other things) Hellenistic Greek philosophy, which later influenced (among many other things) what we now call Western philosophy.

>And how much self-awareness did they have about being the "Fathers of Western Philosophy?"

Less than zero. Not only did they not think of themselves as fathers of Western philosophy (which itself was a category that did not exist and could not have existed until they had both been long dead), they didn't even think of themselves as fathers of a philosophical traditional grater than a subset of what we now think of as Greece.