Don't be condescending. Just answer the questions regarding by what criteria you judged yourself to be an expert philosopher.
You can't be pinned down because you evade meaningful questions and respond to everything with heaping helpings of home-cooked gibberish which you try to say is philosophy.
Just answer my questions without all the diversions, if you please.
Philosophy is:
Metaphysics as knowledge beyond "das Ding an Sich"(Kant) is not knowledge, but beliefs/assumptions/axiom/what ever. It can be done differently, but it is always someone thinking it makes sense.
Ontology as existence/being is not a property of things. It is an idea. Ontology is the catalog of core parts in the human experience. (sort of Kant)
Logic is the limit of logic as much as how it works. Connects to rationalism. Pure reason always operate on its own and says not about the rest of the world. Logic is a process in a brain, a behavior. E.g. non(A or non-A) only applies to something is a sense and in time and space. The limit is that it can't tell if other human is intellectually wrong, but only that they think differently. A belief is not wrong in itself. It is wrong, because how you reason about it. Back to your "useful".
The combination of logic and rationalism fell out off favor after Descartes. (And again Kant).
Epistemology as justified true belief runs into the old skeptics, Protagoras and Agrippa. Hence the assumption of a natural world as it can't be proved and the reliance on experience(can't remember that philosopher, think it was Locke), though not all experience are sensory. Hence the problem of qualia and how it relates words like "useful" and so on.
Truth relates to how you view words and if you treat truth as correspondence, coherence or redundant.
Then there is the difference between foundationalism and skepticism. In practice it is what axioms you chose. There are no self-evident truths from which everything else follows. Skepticism is in practice the ability to check your assumptions and see if you missed anything and made any fallacies; back to logic. Descartes tried to use it to find something self-evident, he did, but nothing followed from that. The problem with self-evident truth is that it is tautological.
Ethics. Well, can you do with truth or not? There are other issues, but the main one is meta-ethics and realism versus non-realism. Here Protagoras is on again. In practice all attempts to do it with truth, is that it is a fact that humans can hurt each and it doesn't become wrong, just because you say so.
Now historically skepticism went out with the rise of Christianity and reason took seat( there is more but the Middle Ages are not my strong suit).
After the Enlightenment skepticism comes back and so do moral relativism ,later though.
But there is shift in workload. Science get a part of it and differs from philosophy. The modern times; Hume and the other skeptics. Kant, not much of the continental stuff, because it is playing with words, though I have done basic existentialism. Crossed path with positivism. Even done Ayn Rand.
Now my blind spot is that I have be around even with the Middle Ages, but is not systematic. It comes from someone claiming something and then looking it up.
On other other hand I have been around metaphysics and know its limits. The same with ontology, logic, epistemology and ethics. But what colors me, is that I got taken in by skepticism. False is as important as true.
As for meeting a standard, well the standard is reason. The problem is if it has limits? Philosophy is thinking(reason and logic) with words and how words relate to the universe if at all?!! Back to axioms and naturalism and what not.
Am I a true philosopher? No, but I pay attention and can change my mind.
At the core I know I got a part of the big picture right.
There is no Knowledge.
Metaphysics is an unknown.
Logic is to learn to do it as much as not how to do it.
Epistemology is that rationalism is a dead end and that empiricism is more that observation, also feelings.
Ethics is to combine reason and feelings and to know the limits. All axioms in ethics are emotional in a sense. Reason you use to check if you have overlook something in your axioms and combine with psychology and so on.
So what is it, that makes philosophy hard? You have to check your assumptions and suspend judgment. It is about following truth and discover its limits. The truth is that there is no Truth. The capital version is the holy grail of philosophy. The universal methodology that answers all. That idea died with Descartes, but it lives in some humans still. It takes practice to learn to known that there is no universal methodology that answers all.
So do I do philosophy with a bias? Yes, I am old-school skeptic. I don't believe in any claim of Knowledge, Reason, Logic and so. It all has limits.
Now what do I want from you? Then same that you want for me. Follow the facts. But because I am old-school, I mistrust any claim of a universal methodology that answers all and that includes Science, but not science.
Regards
