I have to admit, I would tend to agree wih you, papasmurf. I'm am still mystified at the purpose of academic philosophy. I am an engineer, and I took a few philosophy courses because I needed arts credits and they seemed interesting, and I did very well in them. It was fun to spend time arguing with people, but I honestly didn't learn anything. The skills that were useful in the classes were skills that I already had, and in fact, I did better than most of the philosophy majors in the class.

One of our readings in one class (albeit a first year course) was Nagel's "What is it like to be a Bat?". I found it to be very verbose, and basically he was saying over and over again "I can imagine what it's like to be a person in a bat's body, but I can never know what it's like for a bat to be a bat". Okay, fine. It's good that you recognize different subjective viewpoints. But come on, this is someone's famous career-making project? I just don't see how that compares to, say, discovering the structure of DNA.

The thing that gets me about philosophy is that the kids who go into philosophy read a bunch of essays that were written by other philosophers, and if they decide to stick with the field, maybe they'll end up as a professor of philosophy writing essays for other philosophers to read. It seems to be a self-serving cycle that doesn't really affect people outside of the field. Why not just become a novelist and share your philosophical outlook that way?

I apologise to you philosophy students out there. This has just been my impression of the realm of academic philosophy, and I don't mean to offend you. It's just my subjective outlook.