> Why should I read these decades, centuries, millennia old books as a beginner [1]? In no other field are beginners asked to read old primary texts. One possi

> Why should I read these decades, centuries, millennia old books as a beginner [1]? In no other field are beginners asked to read old primary texts. One possible answer to this question is the same as to the question: Why look at old paintings, read old novels and poetry, watch old plays, and study history? For me, it's partly because I am interested in what humans have created and thought in the past. It's partly because these works are often beautiful—an argument can be as beautiful as a work of art—and studying beautiful things is its own reward. Whether they are true or not is another matter, but just as it's useful to read what other cultures in our own time think about a topic, it's useful to read about what people from other times thought. "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." You can design a course of study that focuses purely on modern logic and epistemology etc if that's what you prefer. But philosophy is not a science (however much philosophers like to think it is) and its not maths. It is a branch of the humanities, and should be evaluated in similar terms to literary studies or history, not biology or physics.