If you are not aware of all that accompanying discussion, you are likely to think you have come up with something profound when you actually haven't. This is why r/im14andthisisdeep/ is a thing. A lot of teens think they have an insight despite the fact that what they thought is neither profound nor novel.
Also, a lot of philosophical reading helps set up frameworks or theoretical scaffolding that can serve as a layer of abstraction that you can build upon instead of everyone rediscovering the same ground principles.
High school physicists are not ploughing through Principia Mathematica, instead they learn the laws of motion and move on. Physicists pretty much leave behind the original sources until you are at the bleeding edge. Why can't philosophy?
Sometimes, however, they do borrow eachother's tools at least.
until it's not, at which point it moves out of the domain of Philosophy and into physics, math, psychology, what have you.
(No, the "philosophical atoms" of Democritus weren't atoms as we now know them. For one thing, the word "atom" means "uncuttable", as Democritus imagined atoms to be the indivisible units of matter, and, more importantly, he had no larger experimental and explanatory framework to slot his ideas into, so he couldn't come up with ideas like molecules and chemistry that, to us, follow quite naturally from the notion matter is made of atoms.)
And philosophers DO consult the original sources. Those would be basic logic and rhetoric. Then they take those and they first build epistemology. Then they use that epistemology to build a framework of metaphysics. Eventually they build the most abstract, highest level piece - ethics. At each step there are varying options, and it is rare that you can point to any of the options as 'clearly true'.
We already know mathematics and similar cannot address everything. A 3-body system of perfect sphere interacting solely under universal gravitation is already in itself so sensitive to initial conditions that the error on any prediction you make grows faster than anything computable. So how is humanity to deal with things that happen on the scale of trillions of trillions of entities interacting in non-linear ways constantly? That's the world we actually live in, and the tools to address it won't come from math. And probably not physics (although maybe).
And that is a problem - what I'd expect from the practitioners of philosophy is to give a concise summary of what exactly is the current state of art answer. Given all that discussion, does the argument make sense (and thus the refutations have been found wanting) or do the refutations prevail?
Okay, there are some topics that are still highly up for debate, or it's acknowledged that the answer must be subjective (as some of the ethical debates do) - in that sense, just make a summary of the strongest currently known arguments pro and contra.
Discussion is a process for getting to results, but the discussion is not a sufficient result by itself - where are the conclusions? Such discussions are a tool for people within a field to produce the results, but the value of the field is limited to what is the outcome of the discussions that can be provided to practicioners of other fields, the final results that they can use in their reasoning. Where is the truth that has been found? Okay, it may be partial, or refuted in future as we obtain more knowledge, but up to our current knowledge, why doesn't the field provide the results of that discussion, removing all the refuted arguments (possibly moving them to a "FAQ list" of "yes, we've thought of that objection and it doesn't matter"), and summarizing (with fine-tuning, improvements and clarification, instead of expanding with more and more comments) the arguments that have been confirmed as irrefutable since Aristotle.
Instead of that, the philosophical community tends to provide all the historical discussion and pretend that that's a satisfactory result of research - it's not. We don't read Newton's Principia and comments of other authors on that to understand physics, we have resources that summarize all that's valid in Principia, that remove all that's not valid in it, that augment what could be improved, and make the original work obsolete for study unless you're a historian. The relationship between Principia and Kepler's findings is interesting from a historical perspective, but orthogonal to the actual content. Why then are we reading e.g. Kant's response to Hume instead of producing (Back then! I'm not talking about a textbook for students, but as something the research field would be expected to write for themselves right after Kant's publications) something like "Hume - revised" where all the Hume's opinions are mercilessly edited (because we shouldn't care about all Hume's opinions, but only those of his opinions that happened to be correct), removing the parts that have been refuted, leaving the parts where Kant's response was found insufficient, and replacing the parts which Kant was able to clarify with Kant's words, with a footnote to attribute authorship. If a refutation matters, then the original work should be altered (Where is the "Nicomachean ethics, 114th revised edition"?), and if a refutation doesn't matter, then you shouldn't be ever reading it in serious literature without a preface noting "this is a historically interesting but erroneous argument, counter-refutation in page xyz). The discussion is something that should matter only for those making new philosophy, but not those studying and applying ("consuming"?) the existing philosophy.
Instead https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/ states "There is no consensus, of course(!), over whether Kant's response succeeds, but there is no more consensus about what this response is supposed to be". Emphasis on the "of course" is mine, because I find that part informative, illustrative, and outrageous - if this is currently considered a reasonable state of art description, then the field seems to explicitly acknowledge that it's worthless, that it's not even attempting to provide any actual answers out of these discussions.
An interesting property of Searle's argument is that, if true, it means that the "strong AI" program is worthless; no discrete system that involves following rules (including neural networks and statistical models) can really "understand" anything.
The reason this came to mind is that Searle includes a large section addressing most (possibly all) of the responses to his argument by counter-counter-arguments. The SEP (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/) has a lovely discussion of the problem and responses since 1980, which seems to fulfil your desire for a "concise summary of what exactly is the current state of art answer". (Unfortunately, that isn't the case in general; the SEP page on Zhuangzi (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/) simply presents one approach, although it's one I haven't seen anywhere else.)
Unfortunately, while Searle presents counter-refutations to the refutations of his argument, and others since have added more and deeper levels of refutations, none have, to my knowledge, been universally acknowledged as prevailing. I personally don't buy Searle's argument (if you accept it, and especially his response to the "systems response", you will have to admit that no one understands Chinese), but that's neither here nor there; others do, and others find failures in his argument that I think are silly.
This is the case with most all philosophy. The only way for a philosophical point to be incorrect is for it to be logically inconsistent with other parts of the same argument, and that is almost never the case in any real arena. A similar sort of situation holds occasionally over in mathematics, say, where Euclid's fifth axiom was argued over for most of 2000 years; eventually it was discovered that you can invert it and produce a similar system that is intuitively inobvious, but logically consistent (and useful). Likewise, which philosophical points you accept depends entirely on what axioms you start with (and unfortunately, philosophical axioms are harder to pin down than geometry's).
My bottom line is that the historical discussion is the point of philosophy. Understanding complex arguments, even if they aren't "true" or if you don't agree with them, is considerably more than worthless.
It is not like every math paper starts out with the axioms of Peano arithmetic.
Does your question still make sense?
It's much harder to assess the quality of ideas in philosophy.
I can only imagine how depressing it must be to do academic research on age-old philosophical questions - an endless literature survey, at the end of which there is no light, because even if you "solve" the problem, many others will not find your solution satisfactory.
Scott Soames' two volume work on the history of analytical philosophy is a great introduction to that side of the field and will get you up to speed with the the trajectory the led to what contemporary voices in the domain are grappling with now: https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Analysis-Twentieth-Cent...
But that's just one side of philosophical thought, continental philosophy is very important as well. A good historical sketch of that milieu can be found in Delacampgne: https://www.amazon.com/History-Philosophy-Twentieth-Century/...
Some important recent voices from the continental side are probably Foucault, Zizek, Slotterdjik, Gadamer, Habermas, the Frankfurt School.
Finally you could just ignore everything prior and read Wittgenstein. Personally, if we're talking GIANTS among the Giants the list goes something like: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Wittgenstein. (I am of course, limiting myself to Western thought).
As with any field there are plenty of voices who have contributed a legion of ideas with varying amounts of success, but I'd say those names are the heaviest hitters. Wittgenstein is arguably still the most recent philosopher to have affected a paradigm shift. (though I think one could make a fairly convincing argument for including Foucault in those ranks as well).
Philosophy in general is a very interesting field because it often benefits from discoveries in other disciplines, in addition to having often motivated/been the birthchamber of said disciplines (see for instance, the often symbiotic relationship between linguistics and the philosophy of language).
And how could any such list leave out von Hartmann?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Robert_Eduard_von_Hartman...
http://www.iep.utm.edu/hartmann/
https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/selections/eduard-von-h...
But anyway, I wouldn't include him for the same reason I wouldn't include Pierce, James, and some other american pragmatists, or more enigmatic figures such as Cioran and Bataille--namely because while my personal perspective on their thought is that it's excellent and deserves serious consideration, and they are some of my favorite philosophers to read, their work hasn't had as great a historical impact on the world stage as these other major figures.
I would drop Sartre and add Heidegger instead in that list. And I favor Suarez over Aquinas.
For something more obviously relevant to this crowd, you could look at the work of Hubert Dreyfus, a Heidegger scholar whose insights into the limits of viewing intelligence as symbolic cognition has actually been influential in the history of AI. It's not super recent, but maybe it takes some time for philosophy to become intelligible; when it is really interesting, it also probably seems weird when it's fresh.
A few references for Dreyfus:
1. His recent paper "Why Heideggerian AI failed and how fixing it would Require making it more Heideggerian"; a quote below. http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf
"As I studied the RAND papers and memos, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, the pioneers in CS had learned a lot, directly and indirectly from the philosophers. They had taken over Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a “universal characteristic”—a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed,—Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Russell’s postulation of logical atoms as the building blocks of reality. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program.
At the same time, I began to suspect that the critical insights formulated in existentialist armchairs, especially Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s, were bad news for those working in AI laboratories– that, by combining rationalism, representationalism, conceptualism, formalism, and logical atomism into a research program, AI researchers had condemned their enterprise to reenact a failure."
2. David Chapman's curious autobiographical book review of a somewhat hokey book on "integral philosophy", that goes into his own story at MIT's AI lab and his encounter with Dreyfus's critique; quote below. https://meaningness.com/metablog/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artif...
"In 1987, we wrote a computer program called Pengi that illustrated some of what we had learned from Dreyfus, Heidegger, and the Continental philosophical tradition. Pengi participated in a life-world. It did not have to mentally represent and reason about its circumstances, because it was embedded in them, causally coupled with them in a purposive dance. Its skill came from spontaneous improvisation, not strategic planning. Its apparently intelligent activity derived from interactive dynamics that—continually involving both its self and others—were neither subjective nor objective. Pengi was a triumph: it could do things that the old paradigm clearly couldn’t, and (although quite crude) seemed to point to a wide-open new paradigm for further research. AI was unstuck again! And, in fact, Pengi was highly influential for a few years."
3. Dreyfus's book about his reading of Heidegger, called Being-in-the-world, and if one wishes, a recent movie of the same name. Here is one of my many highlighted passages from the book, which is flattering to computer scientists, but also might make you wonder if there is any philosophy that is critiquing current AI research in a way that will seem prescient years down the road:
"Having to program computers keeps one honest. There is no room for the armchair rationalist's speculations. Thus AI research has called the Cartesian cognitivist's bluff. It is easy to say that to account for the equipmental nexus one need simply add more and more function predicates and rules describing what is to be done in typical situations, but actual difficulties in AI—its inability to make progress with what is called the commonsense knowledge problem, on the one hand, and its inability to define the current situation, sometimes called the frame problem, on the other—suggest that Heidegger is right. It looks like one cannot build up the phenomenon of world out of meaningless elements."
Philosophy is not that kind of human endeavor. There is no "state of the art"; instead, Plato is as state-of-the-art as he ever was[2][3] and every publishing philosopher has novel ideas (or at least hopes they do, although they might also like to learn that some ancient sage has expressed support for their notions).
My personal way of viewing philosophy is as a conversation. A philosopher starts by finding other statements that they like or don't like. Then, they add their own thoughts, modifying previous ideas or attacking or supporting them, all with the best arguments they can muster. From all this, you, as an innocent bystander, can pick out the threads that best let you sleep well at night.
[1] And if I've ever written a more philosophical paragraph, I don't know what it is. I wish to submit it to the Faculty of the College of Liberal Arts, blah, blah, blah.
[2] I'm sure I'll be vigorously attacked by analytic philosophers at this point. There are very much schools who would like philosophy to be more akin to the sciences or (even better) mathematics (but without all the icky evidence and formal proofs and such). But then, the only particular sympathy I've had for analytic philosophy I've recently discovered due to an interest in Daoist philosophy.
[3] Except for Epicurus. He seems to have won on some topics---his physics; if you're a materialist, you're Epicurean even if you don't already know it---and everything else seems to have been misplaced. Which is the interesting part, dang it.
He died recently which prompted me to get his On What Matters which has good reviews, but hasn't reached the top of my pile yet.
My view is that philosophy is rather slow moving and gestates with societal changes rather than big thinking leaps. And I tend to agree with pg that philosophy went wrong a long time ago and descended into a war of definitions:
Since this is more mathematics than philosophy, the latest truly novel idea is also a few months old instead of a few decades. You really just have to start somewhere and work your way forward. :)
> There's a lot more reading that needs to be done before you can make a contribution.
Just like software engineering unless you count Hello Worlds as contributions. But even then one can do simple things like that in philosophy.
> A lot of it progresses by just reading the works of the established masters, getting ideas, and publishing your thoughts about what they had to say.
Sounds like reading white papers and RFCs to me.
> You don't start from scratch. You build on what is already there.
The same. Just check how much transpilers and leftpad like libraries a JS Hello World app needs!
And so on...