While I share a loathing for everything having to be a study of what someone else said a long time ago, I think it's mainly in the areas where we've not made mu

While I share a loathing for everything having to be a study of what someone else said a long time ago, I think it's mainly in the areas where we've not made much definite progress that this phenomenon happens most. Only historians bother with Aristotle's physics today because we have something definitively superior that we can prove is more correct than his model. Same for biology (arguably his key area of interest). But when it comes to ethics I don't think we can say the same thing. I'm not even sure for some areas of politics. When I read Thomas Hobbes Leviathan I found myself thinking "Wow, at least no thinking person will ever defend that philosophy again" and then a couple of decades later Steven Pinker did just that. We're really not making much progress in the humanities. I'd like to think we're done (intellectually speaking) with chattel slavery as a concept but who knows. Grant and Sherman made bigger contributions to that argument than a whole swathe of philosophers either way.