Anton - Thank you. For what it's worth that's about the most sense I've ever heard spoken on the topic, I found the post very informative. Your point about scholasticism and its causes had not occured to me before. It explains something about the current situation in professional philosophy that has been baffling me for a long time. I've been putting it down to some sort of blindness, causes unknown, and it hadn't occurred to me that it might be a fossilized administration exerting a bias on what gets published as part of a well-known evolutionary process,