Great! I think that this is a neat and decent description of philosophy as an academic discipline. This also sparked a series of more detailed questions, and I haven't yet decided if I'll reply with another blog post, or if I should try to fit my reply in a single comment.

So, maybe I'll just mention a few of the ideas which make me curious to hear more - what does either Amie Thomasson or MattiJ think in better detail, or is my initial understanding wholly misguided and before going to details I should be better educated about the basics. So here goes, my basic questions;

(1) Does that imply that "functions and meanings or our words and concepts" can be clarified by sitting alone, eyes closed, in an arm-chair doing conceptual analysis? Or, does "conceptual analysis" here mean something bit more empirical? That to figure out functions and meanings of words we need to go out to the real world to observe how human groups and societies use language whilst navigating their daily lives, and then - rather than measuring with a scale or a thermometer - we use conceptual analysis to further clarify the words and their functions?

(2) If we are to redesign some of our words and concepts, does that mean that a new concept (in order to be conceivable at all) needs to be explained and defined using the old words and their meanings? This, I'm afraid, is somewhat similar than the classical 20th Century question of commensurability; let's suppose that we already have a vocabulary V, and then a radical philosopher drafts a concept "x", which never was part of the V. Now, speakers of V would ask "Okay, dr. Philosopher, please explain us what does x mean?" - and if the philosopher manages the explain X using concepts of V, that automatically means that there is nothing profoundly new in x. And does the opposite case mean that the concept of "x" will appear as non-sense to the speakers of V, so that they can't even distinguish x from totally meaningless random noise? Or, if we aren't satisfied with these binary opposites, then how do we conceive the human ability to discover new concepts? Is it something like the romantic idea of a Creative Genius who using innate creative powers crafts something which didn't exist before, and then the audience goes "wow!" - or is it something more modest, like "discovering a rabbit in the foliage" (borrowing a metaphor from M. Merleau-Ponty) ?

(3) Oh, a discussion about which purposes and functions we should want to have anyway! In a way I feel that I always wanted to participate in that discussion, and felt disappointed when the human society around me seemed totally uninterested in having such a conversation. Although, I'm not quite sure what are the limits and boundaries of this discussion as imagined by AmieT or MattiJ; doesn't this contain the eerie possibility that in some theoretical cases we might find ourselves (as egalitarian humanists, which I suppose we both could be described as) having a discussion with fascists, calmly judging if fascists purposes and functions better serve a community than the purposes and functions based on egalitarian ideas? Well, I'm not going to go further into that topic now, so I'll finish with a short remark; actually, to me it seems that many of the functions and meanings of the Free Western Democracies (and the words and concepts they use to define themselves) still carry a lot of hidden structures which tend to re-create new forms of slavery and oppression. So, I mean, the taboo-like "never have a discussion with a fascist!" is probably not going to work, for we'd better keep on asking ourselves "Do our own concepts secretly carry tendencies of oppression? What if some further conceptual analysis is going to show how some or our concepts are actually harmful even when we sincerely believed them to good? What if there is a little shadows of a fascist lurking in the concepts and ideas we have adopted? Can we spot those shadows? What can be done to adjust our purposes and functions?"

(Well, but this is just me - a person who has deliberately withdrawn from a lot of social interaction. I don't any more have such a group that I could belong to and participate in the discussion of how that said group should want to organize itself using what kind of purposes and functions. No, instead, in my semi-hermit life I have this discussion as an internal dialogue with myself; "Look, Erkka - this and that way you tend to think and to behave - do those patterns really serve the purposes and functions you think they are good for? And, ultimately, what even are the purposes you should want to have anyway?")