It seemed to me that most writings in philosophy are so verbose that it is hard to see what core patterns there are. Philosophers can make whatever excuses they’d like, but the fact is that if your elegant theory needs a hundred pages of prose (without section titles!) to be expressed, it is not an elegant theory.
And inevitably the theory will be reduced to a paragraph or less anyhow when it is cited as existing work by future scholars.
If I were being cynical I would say that this verbosity creates a maze in which one can hide from criticism.
I definitely saw some very interesting ideas while learning about philosophy, but I agree with you 100%. I think they’re holding themselves back through constant re-elaboration; you can’t build a tower out of dry sand.
The way I see it, the core of philosophy is the hard problem of consciousness. Once you understand that, there's not much left. Some people include aesthetics or ethics in philosophy, but that's really just psychology, biology, maybe sociology.
I can see how aesthetics can be reduced to biology, but I don't think ethics reduces so cleanly. The fields you mentioned are all about what "is" while ethics is about what "ought" to be, and there isn't a clear path from one to the other.
You might not be inclined to explore philosophy, but David Hume pretty much took the field to its logical conclusion, so it's worth studying him. His philosophy was pure and rooted in first principles. Most of philosophy after Hume is tainted by the assumption of premises not derived from first principles.
And inevitably the theory will be reduced to a paragraph or less anyhow when it is cited as existing work by future scholars.
If I were being cynical I would say that this verbosity creates a maze in which one can hide from criticism.
I definitely saw some very interesting ideas while learning about philosophy, but I agree with you 100%. I think they’re holding themselves back through constant re-elaboration; you can’t build a tower out of dry sand.