While I love the premise of philosophy, my impression is that it’s mostly mental mush. For one thing, Western culture is ideals based. We are mobile organisms, with a sequential thought process and consequently think we are going someplace and presume it is toward the ideal, but nature is much more cyclical and reciprocal. Without the ups and downs, it would be a flatline.
Consider the idea of God, as some top down, father figure lawgiver. The logical fallacy of which is that a spiritual absolute, which is the underlaying premise, would be that essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the new born, than the wise old man. Monotheistic religion is essentially a political construct, to validate top down authority, such as divine right of kings. Remember that when societies tried democratic political models again, first originated in pan and polytheistic cultures, it required a separation of church and state. How much does academic philosophy examine that, or is modern philosophy more likely to express a shallow atheism, where that raw sentience, which even academics express though information processing, is dismissed as illusion? Those “mental states” you experience.
Then there is the issue of time; With this sequential thought process, we experience reality as our conscious state going past to future, but which is more foundational, the consciousness, or the thoughts it experiences?
Isn’t the real cause change turning future to past, as in tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns? Thoughts go future to past, as well.
Energy, being conserved, is always and only present and its changing configuration is what creates time, along with temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but no one calls them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space!
I don’t know how willing you are to think through what I’m talking about, as I find that many supposedly well educated people shy away from such debates, but if you are truly interested in the principle of philosophy and not just its current role in academia, you might see there remains a great deal of potential, but it will have to overcome an apparently much greater amount of inertia.
People don’t want truths, they want answers. Priests and politicians provide answers, while philosophy seeks truths. Consequently there are lots of priests and politicians, while philosophers are relegated to the back corners of academia and live on mouse food. Nature deals in truths. Much of human beliefs are little more than leaves and litter, blowing in the wind.
