It feels like their method of thinking is corrupted in some deep way? It's pretty subtle, but academic philosophers seem to think in ways that lead to *less* clarity, while framing this as virtue. It feels like they're "performing thinking"; doing things that resemble thoughts.
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My less-than-charitable interpretation is they're put into a system that incentivizes for prestige and respect; to be a good philosopher is to 'look like' a good philosopher, and good philosophers have dusty tomes and refer to elaborate concepts mere mortals can't understand.
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Focus is placed on figuring out what older philosophers thought, and using complicated, inaccessible terminology. I distrust this; if your words are complicated and inaccessible, your thoughts must be an absolute mess. Clarity keeps you grounded, but alas, it's not prestigious.
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Ofc I'm being kinda strong-language and hyperbole here, and #notallphilosophers; i know a few academic-background philosophers who seem pretty good at thinking, though *all* from that group had training or exposure to non-academic philosophy.
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Communicating complicated things in a way that is easy to understand is much harder than making them more obscure. Anyone who revels in making things harder to understand is just having a dick measuring contest and what they’re saying almost never has any actual worth.
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AFAIK this is a characteristic of continental philosophy. Might it be that your interactions were more with philosophers from the continental tradition and less from the analytical side?
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Every field has to develop a technical vocabulary to think about their subject more precisely than is possible with colloquial language. :/ Sure, obscure language can be used to hide shallow thinking but as such, technical language is a sign of precise thinking -- not messy.
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I've found that the fallacy of "appeal to authority" is particularly pronounced inverse to testable and measurable results in a field. So not surprising academic philosophy is more concerned with identifying what past philosophers thought over building beyond those ideas.
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If I remember right, it was Einstein who said that if you can't explain it in simple terms, you don't really understand it. When I was in uni in an exam & couldn't properly answer a question, I often found that a few random bits of jargon would give me a credit or distinction
