From PhilPapers forum Metaphilosophy:

2011-08-23
What is Philosophy?
I hope it's ok if I throw out there what my understanding of philosophy is.
Plato asked some questions and gave few answers. We keep answering those questions, a few more were added along time, and philosophy is the search for the correct way to answer these questions in each time-period's manner of understanding and capacity to express subtleties in these answers. 

Why we cannot fully understand philosophers of a different time period, and we have interpretations and debates on their accuracy, it's because we cannot think like someone of that period. To us, whatever answers Leibniz gave to metaphysical questions is entirely useless, cause we don't get it - neither linguistically nor conceptually. So we labor at answering them again in a new way, according  to current time epistemic values. 

And trying to make sense of the Greeks, when Ancient Greek is impossible for us to conceptualize. We think it means something very complex, we try and unite and braid all these words which the Greek word has now become. We get this nice ball of knots and fail to see that the concept is in fact far more simple than ours are. The reason their words mean so many things. excruciatingly hard to link, is because they had fewer words! They didn't have as many distinctions as we do. There is no way that we could ever understand their words with our complicated minds.

So, of course, we have to answer those questions again, in a way that can be understood and accepted by our times as the appropriate explanations.