>There's just nowhere to go from that stuff.

Many of the questions Aristotle was grappling with are still open questions. E.g., are there essences? Do statements about the future have a truth value? What is the good life? What is causation?

>Ancient Greek is stained by history - it was the only science taught in Universities for what? a thousand years. That's the catch - its revered beyond all reason due to history.

That's reversing cause and effect. It's not a mere accident of history that it was "taught in Universities for a thousand years".

>But I cannot imagine I would ever again pick up a book of Ancient Greek Philosophy. There's just nowhere to go from that stuff

Actually it's one of the best investments in one's personal development and understanding of the world they could make.

Physical philosophy aside, philosophy, like arts, doesn't get deprecated over time. Aristotle, Plato, Seneca, Epictetus, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, etc are as relevant as they ever were.

Sure it was. It was all they had for 'science' for a thousand years. Something about the 'dark ages'.

And, as stated above, been there and done that.

>Sure it was. It was all they had for 'science' for a thousand years. Something about the 'dark ages'

There was not much "dark" about the dark ages (as 20th and 21st century scholarly research increasingly showed), and what little was was due to the collapse of a huge organized empire, not because because "that was all they had for science" (I guess "that" being Aristotle).

In any case, this is an extremely shallow assessment of the role of philosophy -- like someone reading Cliff Notes on Shakespeare and thinking they got all there is to it.

> It's not a mere accident of history that it was "taught in Universities for a thousand years".

What are your reasons for this that are not historically contingent?

> Physical philosophy aside, philosophy, like arts, doesn't get deprecated over time. Aristotle, Plato, Seneca, Epictetus, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, etc are as relevant as they ever were.

Except Kant and Leibniz believed things about mathematics and logic that were later found to be unequivocally false. Plato's view of mathematics is still arguable if you rephrase it enough, but it needs some big modifications. Spinoza's attempts at writing his arguments as if they were geometrical proofs are a joke, he pulls axioms and rules of deduction out of the air.

That's not to say that the things they said about the non-physical (even the ones already found to be wrong) are not valuable, but they're a far cry from being "as relevant as they ever were."

That's funny, I've seen Stoicism making inroads in various places lately, including this very hallowed forum.

Because when people hear "ancient Greek philosopher" they think of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Figures like Zeno and Epicurus are mostly overlooked.

You could also history is stained by the ancient Greeks--and thus the present is stained by ancient Greek thinking, which is exactly why it's so important to study. Aspects of morality or the scientific method that we take for granted need to be understood in a historical context, and if you want to understand the modern world, you need to understand the thousand-year foundation it's built on.