[Serious] Generally speaking, is philosophy a worthwhile subject of study?

[emjay]

That's an interesting point I've never heard before. But again I'd say the same as above; it's not that I would wish the source material itself to change, just at most my own reading comprehension/parsing abilties. So I can fully accept that 'the medium [can be] the message' or that 'oversimplifying [can be] falsifying', whether that be the dialogues of Plato, or Shakespeare like GN mentioned earlier; something would basically get lost in the translation from original form to simplified/modern (or extracted) form, it would be like lossy compression in computing terms ;-)... or similar to poetry, where the words used are meant to evoke multiple meanings etc, and in their case, probably any change at all would destroy their original meaning.

You bring up a good point here, in emphasizing the language. I'd say that's a large part of doing philosophy -- just getting clear on what the words mean.

For example in translations of Aristotle, they might give you eudaemonia, kalon, and arete in some modern English more-or-less equivalent. But a key thing we learn from him is that our modern view of happiness is just very different from eudaemonia, and using the former word as equivalent to the latter is going to be way misleading. Learning why that is is half the battle in learning what Aristotle has to say. Relying on a translation that hasn't bothered with lengthy explanations of the vocabulary is a waste of time. 

This goes back to what Russell was saying: we think we have an idea of happiness, goodness, etc. But when we read Aristotle we discover that very different concepts and systems are possible. Our eyes are opened to different possible worlds. (Science fiction claims to do this, but almost always the characters in distant galaxies have all the values and concepts of modern Americans, and don't even know that alternatives are possible.)

Just about every philosopher, even modern ones, have to use certain terms in specialized ways. But that's no problem -- it's half the fun. And it's not a problem unique to philosophy, since just about every field needs its special terms.

Yeah, I can understand that. Ie as much as I appreciate Aristotle's style... its structure and I think his intention to be as clear as possible, dedicating whole chapters/sections to defining his terms etc... as much as I appreciate all of that, when I was reading it, it was clear that a lot of his terms had different meanings, though the same words, as our modern equivalents/translations/assumptions. I can't give any examples right now, because I haven't read or thought about Aristotle for a while so have forgotten a lot of it, but I do know that when I was reading it, that caught me out a number of times (not the sort of things you're talking about above, but more general things, even just things like what he means by the words 'nature' or 'physics'), and it's ultimately that that I think is the main cause of our misunderstandings when we're trying to debate Aquinas etc. Ie its deceptively similar to modern thinking/assumptions on first impressions, but those sometimes slight, sometimes major, differences in meaning, obviously make a big difference in truly understanding what is being said. Add to that, what is not being said - in the sense of whatever implicit and unstated assumptions/biases he has from his time and place and whatever came before that he builds upon/is influenced by, and there is even more potential for misunderstanding/not understanding.

But basically the trade-off for all of this is that you can't get this true and deep understanding of this - Aristotle - or anything else without a lot of immersion in the subject, and I've already learnt that reading Aristotle is a massive undertaking, because there's so much of it, as well as being stifled by my own limitations like I talked about before, like for instance I couldn't make head nor tail of all the stuff on predicates and 'predicated of', and for all I know, that may just come down to understanding language structure... ie I think I have a pretty good command of the English language, albeit sometimes being a bit/lot too verbose , but that's never come from a technical understanding of the structure of our language, just practical practice. So yes, I accept that full and deep understanding can't come without a lot of immersion in the subject, but at the same time, sometimes you just want, or need, the Cliff Notes version Ie basically a passable summary, or notes, but like with extracting logical arguments, that's another thing I have difficulty doing, and for the same reasons as for that, but at least there's usually a wiki and that's often a good starting point.