Yes, philosophy has been neutered and confined to the back alleys of academia, where it is shriveled and dried through the lack of any fresh input, but what is the alternative? Priests and politicians telling us the answers, so we can just run with the herd and not have to think?

Maybe what we really need is a real house cleaning of the collective mental attic.

For instance, a spiritual absolute would, logically, be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, than the details of which we are aware.

When we conflate the ideal, which is aspirational with the absolute, which is elemental, the assumption becomes that our ideals should be universal and timeless, rather than unique and emergent. So we do end up out on the fringes of reductio ad absurdum. Which could be the sort of question philosophy might address, if it were to be deinstitutionalized and allowed out of the box of our current belief systems.