Why read old philosophy?
This post is misguided on so many levels. It never once occurs to the author that the reason we still study the ancients is because they were <i>right</i>. Like 90% of HN readers, the author tacitly assumes that old == wrong&#x2F;outmoded&#x2F;bygone&#x2F;eclipsed. She thus concludes that the only possible reason to read the ancients is to study their methods (e.g., <i>how</i> Aristotle wrote) and not their actual ideas (e.g., <i>what</i> Aristotle wrote).<p>This is the same mindset that plagues the obsession with &quot;critical thinking&quot; in education policy today. Everyone thinks that to think &quot;critically&quot; means to think in a particular <i>way</i>, and so the best way to teach such a thing is to teach techniques of logic, reasoning, etc. Hence, on this view, ancient philosophy provides merely a source of examples of how to think about problems in a certain way. Of course, this argument goes, those problems themselves are no longer relevant (or at least the solutions that the ancients proposed to solve them are not). But it is still worthwhile to see why they were wrong, and how we have improved since then. Hurrah, &quot;critical&quot; thinking! We are so &quot;advanced&quot; in our critique!<p>This perspective is offensive to philosophers everywhere, and should be offensive to most people in general, if they only knew enough to be offended. It leads quickly to a path of historicism, if not relativism. &quot;Philosophy&quot; comes from the Greek words <i>philos</i> and <i>sophia</i>, meaning &quot;love&quot; and &quot;wisdom&quot; respectively. This tells us two important things. First, <i>pace</i> the author, philosophy is a way of life after all -- it &quot;is about having certain experiences,&quot; as she puts it. This is indicated by the idea of &quot;love&quot; that is captured in its name. Loving is a way of being. It is not something that you &quot;do&quot; and &quot;stop&quot; and &quot;start,&quot; like a conscious process controlled by our ego. Philosophy, accordingly, is much more than a field of academic inquiry -- it is a way of life, a way of being in the world, properly understood. Second, the object of its love -- <i>sophia</i> -- is important as well. Insofar as it is oriented toward wisdom, philosophy aims at something much higher than the author admits. It aims at knowledge of the whole, not simply the part [0]. Thus, it is impossible to divorce the <i>form</i> of philosophy from its <i>content</i>, as the author here wants to do. In other words, it is not merely the &quot;how&quot; of what Aristotle wrote that is ahistorical, transcendental, and thus still useful for readers today -- it is also the &quot;what&quot; that he wrote as well. We therefore must take seriously the actual <i>content</i> Aristotle wrote, and not simply dismiss it as eclipsed by all the &quot;progress&quot; we have experienced in the intervening years.<p>So what, precisely, did the ancients think? This is the ultimate reason to study ancient philosophy. That reason is this: The ancients saw things more clearly than we see them now. The saw the same world that we did (basic nature has not changed in 2000 years), but it disclosed itself to them in a different way, in a way that was perhaps more original and less encumbered by our modern concepts and dispositions. The ancients saw more clearly many of the fundamental problems that we still grapple with today -- for example, the tension between equality and freedom, between the right and the good, between the community and the individual. (To take examples from political philosophy.) Those problems still abide, but they are covered up in modernity and hard to see. By returning to the ancients, we can recover insight into the precise nature of those tensions, the reasons that they exist, and the reasons that they may be unsolvable. (Contra the modern&#x2F;Enlightenment conceit that all problems are solvable given enough knowledge.) This doesn&#x27;t mean embracing a sort of nihilism. Quite the contrary -- it means seeking out a kind of &quot;wisdom&quot; that is presently occluded.<p>For a thought experiment (though this may be hard for atheists to stomach), imagine if the author had suggested that the only reason to still read the Bible today was to understand &quot;how&quot; Jesus acted the way he did, or &quot;how&quot; God did what he did. That would be ridiculous. Of course there is more reason to read the original text than that. And Bible is a very old text indeed.<p>[0] For a discussion of the five different ways of knowing (episteme&#x2F;techne&#x2F;phronesis&#x2F;nous&#x2F;sophia, or science&#x2F;art&#x2F;prudence&#x2F;intellect&#x2F;wisdom) see Aristotle&#x27;s Nicomachean Ethics, Book 6, Chapter 7.