Academic philosophy has its priorities in the wrong place. Their priorities are as follows:
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First study everything anyone else has written or thought or done, familiarize yourself with the vast literature in your field.
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Create an original writing or idea or work, never duplicate what someone else has already done (this is why you must study study study what other have already done, to make sure you never naively repeat what someone else has already said, thought etc.)
The problem with this is that it disregards truth to a secondary status, at best. Academics care less if what someone says is true than they care if it is original or a repeated thought already said by someone else. Their focus is on creating new ideas, new work all the time and this pressure exists on graduate students as well as professors to keep producing original materials, new interpretations and theories. You end up with a lot of nonsense being created just because the person needs to create SOMETHING, anything, to remain relevant in academia and to hopefully secure tenure (this is why, for example, the idiotic “Gettier counter-example” was created).
Students in philosophy at first want to say something truthful, they are motivated by seeking the truth; later they realize this isn’t good enough, their professors care a little about truth but care much more about who said what and when and if you really know that whole history, and if you avoid saying something someone else already said because well how embarrassing if you do! They will level the charge against you, even if you speak something truthful and came up with it on your own merit, “well don’t you realize so and so already wrote this back in blah blah blah year??”
Academics is highly proprietary, deeply capitalistic in this way. Truth is sill valued but takes a back seat to one’s “proper” role of paying respect and deference to “whoever said it first”, and to the pathological need to always be coming up with original ideas regardless if those ideas are actually good or not.
In this Murphy’s Law (whatever can happen, will happen) setup you have a lot of philosophers and grad students today exploring every possible little micro-niche in every field and sub-field in order to mine for even the smallest kernel of “something that hasn’t been said yet”. You end up with someone somewhere in philosophy saying just about anything at all and clinging to it like it were a fucking truth just because it’s their pet idea meant to secure their foothold in the history of “original thinkers”.
