I think this is an excellent description of where philosophy has gone wrong for me personally. I took a class in high school and found the study of what amounts to history to be rather tedious and fruitless. A close friend was a philosophy major in college and understood lots of abstractions that came from the field, but it would seem that none of them were applicable to everyday life. They were not useful or practical in any fashion.
It's very much like learning the history of mathematics without being able to e.g. solve an integral, or model a problem in the real world and make meaningful observations about the model and its relation to the subject. History is fine if it's what you're into, but the other is not taught in any widely disseminated fashion and I believe people and society are deprived as a result.
There are entire sub-disciplines of philosophy that are useful and practical for everyday decision making. Here I would disagree that you need a formal background in mathematics. Game theory, statistics and the like are certainly valuable, but they are still more a part of the engineer's or mathematician's toolkit and will be glossed over due to their rigorous technical underpinnings that are simply out of reach for many individuals. Rhetoric, critical thinking, stoicism, ethics, and the like are pretty approachable topics that have somehow been elided from the educational system in any established fashion in the US - and they used to be at the core of a liberal arts education. Great religious thinkers, politicians, and intellectuals have left a legacy of work that speaks across time and space to a modern reader.
There is an analytical strain, of what I consider a better class of philosophy - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism , just it tends to be in a minority among university courses. I had to seek it out.
A lot of 'continental' philosophy seems to be a mix of historical analysis, and cult-of-personality/lit-crit...
It's very much like learning the history of mathematics without being able to e.g. solve an integral, or model a problem in the real world and make meaningful observations about the model and its relation to the subject. History is fine if it's what you're into, but the other is not taught in any widely disseminated fashion and I believe people and society are deprived as a result.
There are entire sub-disciplines of philosophy that are useful and practical for everyday decision making. Here I would disagree that you need a formal background in mathematics. Game theory, statistics and the like are certainly valuable, but they are still more a part of the engineer's or mathematician's toolkit and will be glossed over due to their rigorous technical underpinnings that are simply out of reach for many individuals. Rhetoric, critical thinking, stoicism, ethics, and the like are pretty approachable topics that have somehow been elided from the educational system in any established fashion in the US - and they used to be at the core of a liberal arts education. Great religious thinkers, politicians, and intellectuals have left a legacy of work that speaks across time and space to a modern reader.