How much of philosophy is mere lofty sophistry and bamboozlement?

[Peter S]

A lot of philosophic language is hard to follow. The attempt to do so leads to boredom. I can understand if some of the hair-splitting is a result of efforts toward semantic precision, but it seems to me that conciseness is at least as important. If it ain't crisp, it's suspicious.

The gurus of counterintuitive, who proliferated and prospered as drug abuse became frequent in the late 1960s, appear to be the end of a long parade of famous bullsh!tters that began in medieval France. Real philosophy began with Aristotle, and all later ones were empirical natural scientists, such as biologists and physicists, whose theories were rooted in reality and who could check their opinions by experiment.