Quote:
There is nothing to stop us from lifting a sentence from an old text and seeing what it can do for us now. If we want to lift the thought, not just the sentence, we may have to put some work into deciding what the sentence meant. If we aren't prepared to do that we shouldn't expect too much of it, and we certainly shouldn't disparage its author if we don't get too much from it. But given that precaution we will often find it relevant to our concerns, because much philosophy arises from facts about human beings and human life which are pretty stable -- at any rate they haven't changed much over the last 3,000 years.
From Edward Craig, Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (New York, Oxford University Press, 2002)