What is the Point of Studying Ancient Philosophy?

The philosopher, Michael Huemer, recently wrote a piece arguing against historical philosophy. In his words:

We should think, for example, about what is the right thing to do, not what Kant said was the right thing to do; we should think about what is real, not what Plato said was real.

His primary target is academic philosophers studying history, but it’s a fair point and one that we can restate it to applying and studying the philosophy of Stoicism today:

We should think about what the right thing to do is, not what Marcus Aurelius said was the right thing to do; we should think about the correct theory of mind, not what Epictetus said about how the mind works

We can paraphrase another one of Huemer’s points to make this challenger even sharper:

There are people today who are followers of Epictetus. They are Stoics. I think that’s crazy. If Epictetus lived today, there is no way that he would be a Stoic. If we brought him through time to the present day, he would swiftly start learning modern science, whereupon he would throw out his outdated worldview, and he’d probably laugh at the modern Stoics.

A serious challenge, but does it land? Yes and no.