personal philosophy

I always found it weird that philosophy spends so much time talking about specific historical philosophers. Who cares what Aristotle, or Kant, or Hume thought (or would have thought) about a particular topic? Shouldn't we just care about what's actually true? And in cases where this is difficult to resolve, why not represent the possible positions in terms of their intellectual content (speaking, e.g., of 'utilitarian' or 'deontological' or 'virtue' ethics), rather than by their association with specific historical figures? (e.g., Mill, Kant, or Aristotle respectively)

It helps to realize the limits of philosophy. Philosophy deals with questions for which the 'right answer' is not (yet) well-defined: at its best, it shows us some ways of thinking that have not yet been fully discredited (meaning that they are internally consistent and don't lead to any really unacceptable conclusions).

We might say that most 'big' philosophic ideas (dualism, idealism, …) create a number of problems that must be resolved, and that the world of ideas is big enough that these can be resolved in different ways. We can think about ideas as puzzle pieces, and assembling a philosophical view is the problem of assembling (and where necessary, creating) a set of puzzle pieces that both fit together (are logically consistent) and that cover a large area (resolve many important questions).

Unlike a jigsaw puzzle, which we do on a table, the philosophical space is big and high-dimensional: any given piece can be combined with others in many possible ways. And there are many possible solutions, all of which are unsatisfying in various ways: they leave some areas uncovered, or require forcing pieces together that don't quite fit, leading to tension and instability. It may be more edifying to think of the problem as that of creating a sculpture or a building from strangely shaped blocks.

We all face the problem of assembling our own philosophies. To do this, we need to understand the space to be filled (questions to be answered) and the pieces available for us to build with. This doesn't inherently require us to study sculptures that others have made. But in practice, it does: you learn to build by studying great builders, even if you ultimately plan to build something different. In practice, most learning is by demonstration.

In order to understand a building block, we need to understand how it fits together with other blocks. Are some combinations unavoidable, or do multiple options exist? In practice we have no better way to represent this knowledge than by referring to examples of particular edifices that have been built in the past.

Ultimately most non-historians don't need to care what Aristotle specifically thought. But he fit together a certain set of ideas in a particular way, building a large structure that is somewhat unique, and humanity has only a few such examples of large, well-constructed intellectual structures whose properties are described in a rich corpus of writing (it takes a lifetime of writing to build and document such a structure, and most people, for good reason, spend their lives doing other things). If we had many such structures, it would eventually be more efficient to try to distill them into a theory, but as of now we need to get intuition by studying the examples we have.

This makes philosophy different from mathematics, where we are ultimately building up a common, shared intellectual structure. There is no room for personal ownership or individual views in such a structure. Given a well-defined mathematical question, no one but historians would care what Newton 'would have thought' the answer is; it only matters what's true (an exception is where we have competing formalisms to describe the same objects or ideas, like Newton's calculus vs Leibniz).