I wholeheartedly agree on your first point. I was a philosophy major and it was frustrating how so much of the philosophy of mind field were attempting to "run" off with their ideas before they could "stand".
I realize this could be true for a lot of other schools of thought, but it seemed especially prominent when arguments about what makes a person seem to rely on a lower-level assumption of how the brain works.
The way I see it, that's basically the definition of philosophy. When some sub-discipline of philosophy becomes clear enough to define its questions, they give it some other name (cf linguistics, economics, "natural philosophy")
What's left as "philosophy" is always the stuff where we don't even really know what questions to ask. So we kick them around for a few centuries, or millennia, in the hopes that something will eventually take on a shape that can be pursued in a better-defined fashion.
> So we kick them around for a few centuries, or millennia, in the hopes that something will eventually take on a shape that can be pursued in a better-defined fashion.
This process has a name : The Great Conversation [0]. Bit presumputious to me to think Plato would have any clue as to what we're saying, but it is a good name for a thing.
An interesting observation, but there's also an analytical side to philosophy: bringing in information from other fields, figuring out the implications, possibly drawing conclusions, and pointing out new directions to try.
I realize this could be true for a lot of other schools of thought, but it seemed especially prominent when arguments about what makes a person seem to rely on a lower-level assumption of how the brain works.