> they seek a return to a time when a philosopher was prized for obscurantism and bon mots rather than an increase in clarity? I have yet to encounter any othe

> they seek a return to a time when a philosopher was prized for obscurantism and bon mots rather than an increase in clarity? I have yet to encounter any other philosopher who was able to present an idea as clearly as William James did, and he was operating during the time of which you speak. Now, I have not read all that much philosophy in-depth, precisely because so much of it seems divorced from everyday reality and because so much of it is filled with enough jargon that one must already be on the path to becoming an academic philosopher to get much out of it. With James, on the other hand, I've found that whenever I disagree with him (which admittedly is not too often) I can always point to exactly where my thinking diverges from his, and why. The following quotes from the article very much reminded me of what I like about him: > Philosophy, understood as the love of wisdom, was seen as a vocation, like the priesthood. It required significant moral virtues (foremost among these were integrity and selflessness), and the pursuit of wisdom in turn further inculcated those virtues. The study of philosophy elevated those who pursued it. Knowing and being good were intimately linked. It was widely understood that the point of philosophy was to become good rather than simply to collect or produce knowledge. > Our claim, then, can be put simply: Philosophy should never have been purified. Rather than being seen as a problem, “dirty hands” should have been understood as the native condition of philosophic thought — present everywhere, often interstitial, essentially interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary in nature. Philosophy is a mangle. The philosopher’s hands were never clean and were never meant to be. I have heard James referred to as the last philosopher who thought that philosophy was something practical that everybody ought to consider in daily life. Not in a pop-psych sense where complex things were oversimplified into one weird trick, but in the sense of putting thought into the actions that one takes, paying attention to the habits and attitudes that one cultivates. I take the opposite perspective to the one found in your comment. There were certainly philosophers of James's time and before who were deliberately obscure and slippery, but there's no way for most of us to tell if their modern-day counterparts are behaving as badly because the terminology and its underlying concepts are so formidable. They may have been hammered out in the pursuit of clarity--though I am skeptical about this--but the effect is the same as building a brick wall to keep out the layman. I will not even say that it does not have its place, but I think it's a shame that the entire field is so specialized. It's as if everyone were required to be a mechanic in order to drive a car. That is something that makes sense when a field is new, not as it matures.