Why read old philosophy?

>Could you define "got anything out of it" for me?

Retained any information that gave them skills or enrichment. Skills we can measure as an increase in human capital. Enrichment is tougher, but for enrichment to take place the information has to be retained, and we have plenty of data on the abysmal state of retention.

> And what is a universal item that literally everyone will use in their life? We could probably stop general education after grade 3 if that was the goal of education.

That was not a requirement I implied needing to set. Literacy and basic mathematics are useful far beyond grade 3 (though their pedagogy and targeting could be drastically improved), but as a rule, most knowledge doesn't need to be taught to everyone. We can come up with selection mechanisms that are better than the crudest imaginable: teaching everyone and hoping that a minuscule fraction get something out of it. Extending/adding recess would be far better than that.

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 right. Like 90% of HN readers, the author tacitly assumes that old == wrong/outmoded/bygone/eclipsed. She thus concludes that the only possible reason to read the ancients is to study their methods (e.g., how Aristotle wrote) and not their actual ideas (e.g., what Aristotle wrote).

This is the same mindset that plagues the obsession with "critical thinking" in education policy today. Everyone thinks that to think "critically" means to think in a particular way, 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, "critical" thinking! We are so "advanced" in our critique!

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. "Philosophy" comes from the Greek words philos and sophia, meaning "love" and "wisdom" respectively. This tells us two important things. First, pace the author, philosophy is a way of life after all -- it "is about having certain experiences," as she puts it. This is indicated by the idea of "love" that is captured in its name. Loving is a way of being. It is not something that you "do" and "stop" and "start," 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 -- sophia -- 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 form of philosophy from its content, as the author here wants to do. In other words, it is not merely the "how" of what Aristotle wrote that is ahistorical, transcendental, and thus still useful for readers today -- it is also the "what" that he wrote as well. We therefore must take seriously the actual content Aristotle wrote, and not simply dismiss it as eclipsed by all the "progress" we have experienced in the intervening years.

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/Enlightenment conceit that all problems are solvable given enough knowledge.) This doesn't mean embracing a sort of nihilism. Quite the contrary -- it means seeking out a kind of "wisdom" that is presently occluded.

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 "how" Jesus acted the way he did, or "how" 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.

[0] For a discussion of the five different ways of knowing (episteme/techne/phronesis/nous/sophia, or science/art/prudence/intellect/wisdom) see Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book 6, Chapter 7.

Yes. It’s just that when they do, it becomes known as logic or science and philosophers get less interested in continuing to think about it.

Almost all of the early work in what we’d call computer science was done by philosophers before computers even existed.

Philosophy is not "This is true" but rather, "What do you mean when you say, this is true".

Nice point. The fundamental questions that we wrestle with are universal across time and geography. Questions such as how we should lead our life and how we should function in a society. The ancients are the best source for understanding these questions and their virtue of having survived through generations is a testament of their value to society.

We are often too quick to dismiss the ancients, who end up more often than not being right all along.