The question “Why read X today?” can legitimately be raised with respect to any premodern thinker, major or minor, in the history of philosophy, and many modern ones as well. Why, one might ask, should we continue to be interested in what philosophers who are so distant from us in time and circumstance had to say? The question is especially acute with respect to those who were writing out of very different concerns and for very different audiences, and whose ideas are uninformed by any philosophical developments (whether new solutions to old questions or new questions altogether) that may have occurred after their time. Indeed, it is not difficult to find contemporary philosophers suggesting that a knowledge of the history of philosophy is irrelevant, and perhaps a genuine hindrance, to doing philosophy – much as scientists might argue that a knowledge of the history of science is irrelevant to doing science – and that perhaps the only reason to learn what earlier thinkers had to say is either to avoid reinventing the wheel or out of purely antiquarian interest.