The apologist in the humanities springs forth as a perennial, an eager advocate for this old man or that classic tome, often as not incurring the wrath of modernity at least as great as his own love for antiquity.  Even these defenses of the humanities ––classics, philosophy and literature being closest to my heart–– have become treasured chestnuts: “It enriches the individual,” “Humanities matters for its own sake,” “It is the source of X or Y.”

Instead of these appeals, which, in my understanding, would only reach those already possessed of a humanistic sympathy, I wish to offer four pragmatic reasons to be interested in ancient philosophy.  These reasons are particularly addressed to those interested in philosophy, especially modern philosophers, whether professors or students or avid amateurs.

1) Ancient Philosophy is a 2,300 year old conversion with great minds.
While there are undoubtedly many great treatises that are being written, or have been in recent memory, there are a number of benefits from focusing on a field of study which has persisted through millennia.  As opposed, to say, Wittgenstein, who has had less than 100 years worth of great minds commenting and interacting with his work, Aristotle has had a prolonged engagement with generation upon generation of thinkers.  Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Hobbes, have all either borrowed, adapted, or explicitly confronted Aristotelean ideas.  These, fortunately, are only some of the philosophers who have gone to the mat with Aristotle; there are countless others, including commentators from late antiquity whose sole ambition was to write on Aristotle.  So two philosophical birds can be had with one stone: if you read other great philosophers on Aristotle, you get two great minds on worthwhile topics.

2) Ancient philosophy provides a common framework for philosophy.
If the definition of philosophy is frustratingly difficult to come by, perhaps we can at least have (or preserve) the canonical philosophy that the Greeks have given to us.  The questions about what is, how we ought to live, how we can know, are central to ancient philosophy, to be sure, but these inquiries continue to guide philosophy in modern intellectual contexts as well.  It is hard to imagine a philosophical question worth pursuing that does not first show up in the pages of Plato, even if it shows up in the philosophical master’s periphery and was not his whole landscape.

3) Ancient Philosophy offers a helping hand.
It is uncontroversial, I hope, to say that every age has its moral or intellectual blindspots.  There are problems we face and cannot solve precisely because we are the responsible party for the undetected arrival of the original difficulty. A benefit of ancient philosophy, however, is that, at the very least, these thinkers do not share the same handicaps that we do.  For their faults, whatever they are, they will not count among them either consumerism, political correctness, or technological worship.  What this means is that when it comes to overlapping philosophical interests, the ancients will have different perspectives and concerns than us, which in turn can provide us novel and insightful answers to the issues we think we have discovered for the first time.

4) Ancient Philosophy explains the ancient origins of modern philosophy.
Did you know that Aristotle gives philosophical reasons to adopt a systematics, that is, a system of animal classification, hundreds of years before Carl Linnaeus? [1] And that this system of classification was in direct response to competing Platonist classifications?  Although surprising, a seemingly “modern” area of philosophy such as the philosophy of biology was already blooming in ancient literature.  Similarly, although outdated in many parts, Aristotle’s Physics and Plato’s Timaeus offer compelling reasoning in such areas as the philosophy of time [2] and various elements of the cosmological argument.  Of course, metaphysics and ethics are plentiful in the Platonic and Aristotelean corpus, and never go out of style.  There are few, if any, books on ethics which can surpass the Nicomachean Ethics.  Even in logic [3] or philosophy of language [4] there is a robust fount of philosophy that began well before those influential modern disciplines, and still have much to offer for those willing to put in the time.

REFERENCES:

[1] See Parts of Animals, Book 1
[2] See Aristotle, Physics, Book 4, Ch. 1-14
[3] see Aristotle’s Organon
[4] The Organon once again, and Plato’s Cratylus)