We need more public philosophy
I suspect academic philosophy has shifted the emphasis so far away from actual discussions towards written essays that philosophers focus more on writing philosophy than on talking to people and having a substantive back and forth exchange.
Of course philosophers do discuss their work, debate it, and so on, but I worry that the contexts in which they do so discourage adequate critical feedback, especially from people who don't already grant some, most, or even all of the presuppositions and methods those philosophers employ.
Such debates are far too tame, and, like sparring matches. When there is a match, it’s always with people from the same schools of fighting, using the same styles, and the norms ensure everyone has padded gloves and does any real damage. So if one’s methods and style aren’t very good, they aren’t put to the test in an optimal way, and one develops a false assurance of their excellence by failing to engage with others more broadly. In other words, where debate occurs, I suspect it is largely insular and confined to the cloisters that compromise academic philosophy.
This is because people can actively curate who they interact with, and norms and expectations about how to proceed in a discussion may discourage the kind of critical Socratic exchanges I've often encountered in online discussions and debates.
If so, I think the field is doing a disservice to itself and to the philosophers it trains. I routinely see people with little or no formal academic training in philosophy perform as well or better in debates and discussions as graduate students in philosophy. It's a lot less common to see professional philosophers in these spaces (they're probably too busy writing essays to actually talk to anyone), but when they do, they rarely strike me as especially impressive.
This is not what I would have hoped for. If professional MMA fighters got in the ring with amateurs, we might expect a talented amateur to occasionally do well, but we'd generally expect the professionals to demolish almost anyone they went up against. But I don't think philosophers would, or in fact do typically demolish opposition, even on topics they specialize in.
While I don't think debate and argument is necessary for any and all approaches to philosophy, and there are likely avenues of scholarship where this wouldn't be the best way to proceed (e.g., maybe historical work where lack of study would render one effectively incapable of discussing the topic in an informed way), there are topics that are sufficiently "publicly accessible" to be subject to debate: metaethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, consciousness, and so on, where at least some aspects of that scholarship would benefit from their proponents having public discussions or debates with people outside of academic philosophy.
In these cases, philosophers can and do debate these issues. But I don't see philosophers demolishing opposition. They often seem extremely anodyne, and don't seem able or willing to hold one another's feet to the fire in a way that is hard to describe in a concise way, but that I think would prompt them to think more carefully about the topics than I think they actually do.
I think philosophers could learn a lot from engaging more with the public. Running YouTube channels, having debates, getting on Discord and duking out their ideas or facing challenges. Again, though, even when I do see this, it seems to make up a tiny fraction of philosophers, and often seems confined to mostly discussions with other philosophers. There are thousands of philosophers. One would have thought they’d all love debating and discussing their interests, but they’re not. So where are they? I think any interested in their careers are likely performing the duties and services necessary to advance (or simply begin) their careers, and there’s little incentive to stream or debate or do interviews, when you could be working on a juicy essay for a “prestigious” journal. So we have an incentive structure that discourages philosophers doing almost anything other than hiding away to write all day. The net result is that they rarely leave the academic hermitage to interact with the public.
However, I think doing so would be valuable both for philosophers and the public. Philosophers could develop their ideas more effectively if they engaged with others, because they’d receive critical feedback they might not receive from their colleagues, and would be constantly expected to explain their ideas in more accessible ways, which could make the field less insular, and less disposed to devising inscrutable jargon. The public, too, would benefit, because they’d probably learn a thing or two from philosophers.
I don’t see it happening, and when I do see philosophers discuss matters publicly (on YouTube or podcasts), I am usually disappointed. Part of the reason for this comes from watching debates between two professional philosophers. I have at least one such debate in mind, and what I saw in this debate was:
(1) Excessive politeness and deference to one another
(2) Both philosophers already knew one another's arguments, and already knew all the standard responses.
It ended up looking like a choreographed fight, carefully orchestrated to look like a pantomime of a real debate, but where there were mutual unspoken assurances that nobody ever actually landed a hit.
The whole exchange struck me as almost farcical, with both philosophers trotting out arguments that have been in the literature for years or even decades. Nobody said anything new, nobody seriously challenged one another, and nobody really seemed all that interested in actually digging into the presumptions or details of one another’s view. It was a shallow, superficial, and useless exchange. And that strikes me as typical of debates between professional philosophers. I typically find a debate between a philosopher and a nonphilosopher much more engaging.
Debates between philosophers are almost never engaging. They are empty, lifeless affairs, where every move is telegraphed in advance. They end up seeming vacuous and performative.
And I fear much of academic philosophy has become just that: vacuous and performative. Maybe it always has been.
I'm watching debates on philosophical topics almost every day, and my experience is quite a bit different. When I see debates between philosophers and non-philosophers on topics which are clearly philosophical, usually the professional philosopher has the upper hand, to put it mildly. For example, the debate between Huemer and Sapolsky on free will - I don't think Huemer had a strong case, but Sapolsky didn't even seem to understand the issue (btw, generally I find Sapolsky's work more interesting, because those empirical facts about what may influence human behavior are intriguing). Another example was the debate between David Benatar and Jordan Peterson about antinatalism - Peterson was hopeless in that debate. I can list many examples from debates in philosophy of religion, where the non-philosopher usually simply doesn't have a coherent view about confirmation theory, or misrepresents what theism/naturalism entails.
Now I agree that facing non-philosophers can be useful: out of a lot of weak objections, some interesting idea can come to surface.
With respect to the excessive politeness and 'performativeness', I agree that the latter is annoying, but I think the most likely explanation is lazyness - maybe some people don't put their best efforts in trying to defeat the opponent, because it would take time and a thorough review of the literature, in addition to empirical research, where is the case. I have no problem with politeness, even when it's excessive, because there are too many debates on youtube which err in the opposite direction, so excessive charity doesn't do much harm.
I am curious what is particularily deffective about the methods employed by analytic philosophers, other than assuming some empirical claims about intuitions to be true. I think it can be revised: instead of saying 'it is obvious that P, and since P entails Q, you have to accept Q', I can say 'if it is obvious to you that P, as it is obvious to me, then you have to consider its consequence Q'.
Finally, the jargon thing. I think this is a very serious problem for continental philosophers, but we, in the analytic tradition, at least try to make our cases clear, even though we sometimes fail to do so. At least no one argues, in analytic philosophy, about what Kripke wanted to said in one of his articles. Maybe there still is too much jargon, but I don't think we can just get rid off it. A bit more worrying, to me, is that many analytic philosophers are likely monolingual, and they rely too much on some peculiar properties of the English language. I am Romanian, and translating analytic philosophy into Romanian is quite challenging, and that may be an indication that some jargon, at least, is idiosyncratic to English.