I would place this sort of article and the "Why do we need to bother with philosophy at all?" articles within the same pool of thought. That people keep dippin

I would place this sort of article and the "Why do we need to bother with philosophy at all?" articles within the same pool of thought. That people keep dipping their toes into this murky pool demonstrates to me that one of the things philosophy has spectacularly failed to do is explain itself to itself. Even at this late stage in the game! To address this article directly though: Katja uses the analogy of skateboarding. This is philosophy as craft, philosophy as art. Think of disciplines being divided into the "what" (subject matter) and the "how" (methods). Philosophy cares about thinking correctly. Philosophy cares about what it means to acquire knowledge about something. Philosophy cares about the difference between quantifying and qualifying. Philosophy cares about fallacies. This means that one learns about how concepts works–how to construct a concept, how to take apart a concept–how to trace its history–how to trace its connections and relations over time. Why read old philosophy? (1) Because "how". In philosophy you read clear thinkers from any age in order to learn how to think clearly. (2) Because "what". In philosophy we trace concepts back as far as we can, ideally with an understanding of the culture and language in which they were expressed. Nietzsche and Derrida would have read Aristotle and Plato in the Ancient Greek, do we do that nowadays? How can we be sure we can trust the contemporary translations? Philosophy cannot usefully be compared by way of analogy with any of the sub-disciplines of the sciences or humanities because the domain of philosophy and the methods of philosophy only overlap with those at strategic points.