If you're unhappy with unclear definitions in philosophy you might appreciate Wittgenstein's Tractatus: http://philosurfical.open.ac.uk/tractatus/tabs.html, in which he uses formal logic to present a proof that all moral philosophy is nonsense. It's considered by some to be the greatest work of philosophy of the 20th century.
"The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy -- and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one."
Wittgenstein himself went on to criticize parts of the Tractatus later in life.
It's a bad idea to treat philosophy as a menu from which one can choose the most appealing items and be left with a satisfactory understanding of the problems at hand.
>It's a bad idea to treat philosophy as a menu from which one can choose the most appealing items and be left with a satisfactory understanding of the problems at hand.
Why's that? All moral propositions ultimately rest on either circular reasoning or unjustified assumptions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument, also see the argument in Wittgenstein's aforementioned Tractatus), so searching for absolute philosophical truth is doomed to failure. There's even a school of philosophy based around this approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism.
I didn't intend to imply that one should search for absolute philosophical truth. In fact, such an idea comes readily into conflict with my statement: it's just the search for an item on the menu that satisfies one completely extended to menu items that have not yet been written.
If you define the success condition for the search to be arriving at the final truth, then yes, you are doomed to failure. That's definitely not my success condition for philosophical inquiry, but now we are getting into why I think philosophy is valuable, which is a bit out of scope here I think, because we both agree that philosophy is valuable. I was just saying that stopping at the Tractatus as if it would satisfy the previous commenter is, well, not good. At the very least one should put the Tractatus in context with Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus is very assailable.
>I was just saying that stopping at the Tractatus as if it would satisfy the previous commenter is, well, not good.
I didn't mean to imply this, rather I meant it as a starting point, to give the commenter an example of a philosophical text that is more formal in its definitions, and hence might frustrate them less. I should probably have made it clearer though that I was just presenting the quote from Tractatus, not necessarily endorsing it.
Well, then it seems that I take issue with your statement purely because I'm a jerk who thinks that the idea that philosophy should leave you less frustrated rather than more frustrated is a bad idea ;)
"The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy -- and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one."