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Comment by kdazzle | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article, and I agree that a lot of the reason for reading old philosophy is so that you know how philosophers should think and argue.

But I always thought there was another practical reason - old philosophy is referenced all the time in newer philosophy - you have to read the older stuff to kind of learn the "language" of philosophy with all of the issues that have been covered and are still being covered.

Plus, old philosophy isn't necessarily irrelevant to contemporary ideas - Pre-socratics had theorized about atoms, for example. Or it's not like ethics, epistemology, or phenomenology will suddenly become irrelevant, though theories surrounding them might change a little bit and be refined and lose references to god.

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> But I always thought there was another practical reason - old philosophy is referenced all the time in newer philosophy - you have to read the older stuff to kind of learn the "language" of philosophy with all of the issues that have been covered and are still being covered.

Sorry to disagree, but that's a "just so" argument: you have to do this because everybody else does. She asks, "why does everybody else do this?" which is a good question.

My thoughts on this are in another long comment on a different thread so I won't waste your time by pasting them again here.

Not at all: if other people reference old philosophy, you may need to understand old philosophy in order to understand them, regardless of whether or not they should be referencing old philosophy.

Compare: if there is a guy speaking French to you in the US, you need to understand French to understand him, even if it would be a whole lot more effective for him to speak English.

Sure, what you say is true but that's not the question she raises. Yours is simply a functional question. A very useful question, but not an insightful one.

To reframe her question with your example, she's asking: "Everyone says I should learn to write French to talk to French people. But the French froze their spelling in the 17th century, while languages like English and German have modernized their spelling. Why should the French be different?"

That is an interesting question. Hers is also: why is philosophy treated differently from, say, Physics in this regard?

Yes, a key reason to read it would be so you don't have to think of it yourself.

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