The debate over whether and how philosophers of today may usefully engage with philosophers of the past is nearly as old as the history of philosophy itself. Does the study of the history of philosophy trains or corrupts the budding philosophers’ mind? As a matter of fact, we, philosophers, by and large do engage with the history of our disciplines and find it useful. This is an essential datum that needs to be taken into account in the debate. So how to study the history of philosophy? We cannot but approach the history of our discipline from our current standpoint, because it is the only standpoint available to us, for viewing all else. There exist different and complementary conceptions of how studying the history of philosophy relates to our philosophical concerns today. In this article, I discuss some mainstream approaches to the study of the history of philosophy (with special focus on ancient philosophy), before explicating my own.