"I would say that this has been, unfortunately for philosophy, the central fact of philosophy. Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by "free." Do abstract ideas exist? Depends what you mean by "exist."
Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.
How did things get this way? Can something people have spent thousands of years studying really be a waste of time? Those are interesting questions. In fact, some of the most interesting questions you can ask about philosophy. The most valuable way to approach the current philosophical tradition may be neither to get lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them down like Wittgenstein, but to study it as an example of reason gone wrong." - PG
Not an appeal to authority, mind you, just a way of saving myself time.
It's a bit of a mistake to classify Wittgenstein as a philosophy professor.
He studied aeronautics originally - bleeding edge in 1908 just after the Wright brothers flight - to the point of starting a Phd as well as holding a patent, and only then became interested mathematics and logic. It was as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army that he wrote Tractatus not cloistered in Cambridge. He then worked as a rural elementary school teacher and architect (he was friends with Adolf Loos, and his family had been patrons of the Secessionist movement).
He only began teaching at Cambridge when he was 40, and was not a professor until he was 50.
There's an interesting book called After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre that does a good job of going through how these confusions over language arise. I haven't read it for years, but I liked how it explained how and why the language of philosophy has changed over the centuries.
Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.
How did things get this way? Can something people have spent thousands of years studying really be a waste of time? Those are interesting questions. In fact, some of the most interesting questions you can ask about philosophy. The most valuable way to approach the current philosophical tradition may be neither to get lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them down like Wittgenstein, but to study it as an example of reason gone wrong." - PG
Not an appeal to authority, mind you, just a way of saving myself time.