Is there any really good reason to read ancient Greek philosophy...

Is there any really good reason to read ancient Greek philosophy? Most of the time it's people trying to explain things that we, in 2016, already fully understand. Sometimes it can be insightful, but overall I find it very tedious.

Yeah

don't fall for the greek meme OP
start with Foucault

Perhaps it's not of a fault of the object that it doesn't seem to meet you, though I'm not implying you have a faulty expectation either. You two have crossed paths and couldn't understand each other. Perhaps another time. That is, if only you allow yourself to go on to other things accepting you don't know it for the time being.

Is there any good reason to read contemporary philosophy? Most of the time it's people trying to explain things that we, in 500 BC, already fully understood. Sometimes it can be insightful, but overall I find it very tedious.

Like what? Most greek philosophy is based around figuring out what is "good" to do... what does science tell us about this? Or rhetoric? Or frankly, how far has politics really come since Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero?

Yea the physics are outdated, but virtually everything related to the humanities are still very relevant.

>tfw a thread had to die so that this shitty bait thread could be born

>how far has politics really come since Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero?

It has come all the way to Machiavelli and mostly stayed there kek

I'm talking about the pre-Socratics, who were more concerned with explaining nature.

>implying we understand Forms in 2016

>capitalizing words to ascribe surplus meaning to them

This is not the way Platobros did it. Though when you're stuck on a language as analytical and philosophically impaired as English, I see why it may be necessary.

Ah for presocratics, probably only their metaphysics is still relevant because it shows up later in guys like Heidegger in a big way.

I highly disagree with people who insist newbs start with the pre-socratics; start with Plato.

I can see why starting with the presocratics is problematic. They deal with the same complicated philosophical questions Plato and Aristotle deal with, but they lack a conceptual framework which would make approaching those questions easier.

Personally, I had trouble understanding them the first time I studied them, but it wasn't that hard. The misconceptions I made were not that numerous or grave. I only understood them satisfactory after I already got a decent knowledge of Plato and Aristotle and re-read the presocratics with that in mind.

The problem is a lot of Plato and Aristotle's works are, same as any work of philosophy ever written, in dialogue with their predecessors and their predecessors are the presocratics. Is it necessary to understand the context of behind these critical reviews? Well, every decent professor would emphesize the context behind the sophists and their beef with Plato just to elaborate that the sophists weren't literally assholes (just because Plato said so). I think the same applies to the presocratics. You can't understand criticism of a subject without understanding that subject.

Plato and Aristotle introduced "ideals" into philosophy which would define western philosophy through the enlightenment. Since we've learned that ideals and more knowledge don't necessarily lead to human happiness like those two seemed to imply, it's worth looking at the pre-socratics to really dig into questions of being, existence, and how human beings with virtually no intact system of thought to build off of conceptualize the universe.

I read the pre-socratics after Plato and before Aristotle, and everyone except Heraclitus still bored me to tears. After reading Nietzsche (especially Birth of Tragedy) and Heidegger (all of it, but especially "Introduction to Metaphysics") you can see how different the intellectual climate was in the world those guys inhabited, and why it's worth reading them.

Not OP but It's not bait, ffs.
It's the fucking truth.

Not really, what we have today is the bastard child of Kant, Marx, Mill and Nee Chan. Machiavelli is too different in mindset.

>le current year meme
>not bait

> Most of the time it's people trying to explain things that we, in 2016, already fully understand.
No, you don't.

I just can't take people who don't find Plato interesting or insightful seriously. Like have you actually read Plato? The guy pretty much paved the way for western civilization. He is like as important as Jesus was for the West.

Do you not see value in understanding how ancient peoples viewed the world?

See

>Most of the time it's people trying to explain things that we, in 2016, already fully understand.

If you think that we understand causation, the problem of universals, what the correct theory of goodness is, what our ethical theory should be, what knowledge is, what our general ontology ought to be, etc then you haven't done enough philosophy. Most of the problems initially raised by Plato and Aristotle are still open questions to this day.