[adjkant]

> "Philosophy's not particularly complicated to someone who understands basic logic."

As with what others have said, you're completely missing the point if all you got from philosophy was logic. Logic is a prerequisite, not philosophy itself.

Philosophy is about exploring big, unanswerable questions. As soon as a field becomes objectively answerable, it splits from philosophy into a subfield usually.

My guess is that you find philosophy to be not a subject and uncomplicated because you don't care about the questions being asked by it, and parse them out, leaving you with the logical structure. If I was left with that, I would think it's a useless field too. But ignoring the interesting parts of a subject doesn't make them disappear from the field itself.

> "there's nothing to study as it's all thought experiments."

Very, very far from it. Is communism a thought experiment? Seemed pretty real to me. What about theory of law and ethics? What about politics? The most effective role of government for human happiness? Is happiness what humans need? All of these are centrally tied to philosophy, in particular ethics. It seems like your philosophy focused so much on logic that you lost most of the subject.

[mattmanser]

Where did you pick all that up from? Every replier has put lies and assumptions into my mouth, because you believe you've a "special" understanding of philosophy. You're not a special snowflake. Again, like the other repliers, you haven't even hinted what you studied, how you studied it, any qualifications, serious academic credentials. I have no idea if you're a fool who's read Sophie's World, or a Doctor in Philosophy. Then again, I doubt you're a Doctor as you've not put forward any cogent arguments. Your arguments are glorified "Oh, no it's not, 'cause I said so!".

I cared about the questions and the content. I'm past that and out the other side.

It's when you realise that despite asking all these questions and coming up with all these wonderful thought experiments that it gets you no closer at all to improving your understanding of the world, of ethics or politics or history or science, even the basics, understanding the meaning of life. All you've got are empty, hollow frameworks that you can break with simple thought experiments that make it obvious real life is far more complicated than armchair philosophy.

And worse still, the further you get along in philosophy, the more advanced work all comes down to petty arguments about the meaning of words.

I was merely using a subset of philosophy, logic, in another comment to highlight how little a module in philosophy actually teaches.

[adjkant]

I picked it all up from college philosophy courses and practical application of philosophy (yes, it does exist, just not often taught). I plan to eventually earn a Ph.D. in philosophy and currently have enough credit to be between a major and a minor, though it isn't my major (CS). I skew towards practical philosophical subjects (social, political, contemporary ethics) for probably many of the reasons behind your frustrations, which I both understand and even share to some extent. Again, as I have said in another comment chain here, your frustrations do not make the field simple, only useless to you, which is a valid stance.

> "It's when you realise that despite asking all these questions and coming up with all these wonderful thought experiments that it gets you no closer at all to improving your understanding of the world, of ethics or politics or history or science, even the basics, understanding the meaning of life."

This has not been my experience nor would it be agreeable to many others. I think there are many people that find it useless, and many who find it useful. Just because you find it useless does not make the field generally useless to all.

You criticize my argument but fail to refute or address any of my response to the content of the field. In fact, you ignore it and keep using the assumption that philosophy is only thought experiments. When every replier has a similar opinion, you probably are better to at least examine it rather than pretending that everyone believes they have a "special" understanding of the subject. No one has pretended to have any big or even small insights on the field, or some huge understanding of even a single philosophy on its own.