As I have said in other articles, I studied philosophy at a mid-level US university in the 1980s, failing badly in second year, primarily because of my Christian approach to problems. Ethics was the topic that led to me withdrawing, but I found all of the topics, like the theory of knowledge, somewhat insane. The type of philosophy done at Anglo-American universities is called “analytic philosophy” and it basically applies mathematical logic and the sciences to solve traditional problems. It also has something of a toolkit of its own, various methods and tricks (linguistic analysis), but I never mastered them. While researching something else I came across a book by leading US philosopher Peter Unger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Unger who published his Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy in 2014. I have not read the book, and probably would fall asleep trying to read it, but I found a revealing interview. Here are some of the best bits:
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/06/philosophy-is-a-bunch-of-empty-ideas-interview-with-peter-unger.html
“Philosophers easily get the idea that somehow or other, just by considering things about the world that they already know, they can write up deep stories which are true, or pretty nearly true, about how it is with the world. By that I especially mean the world of things that includes themselves, and everything that’s spatio-temporally related to them, or anything that has a causal effect on anything else, and so on. They think they can tell a deep story about how it is that all of this stuff really hangs together, that’s much deeper, more enlightening and more comprehensive than anything that any scientist can do.