And in fact even for myself - perception is not necessarily valid evidence since perception can be distorted. If I am in a compelling VR game I might be more than willing to swear to the fact that I'm flying (if I wasn't otherwise aware of the situation) - while you simply look at me acting a fool standing still while vigorously flapping my arms.
The programming analogy to this kind of philosophy is writing design docs (or building a class hierarchy of abstracts) without ever writing implementation. Lots of work, but why should anyone outside the room care?
I also think this is for the best. If one looks at the evidence of the skies it's indisputable that humanity lies at the center of the cosmos, with everything revolving around us - which, in turn, naturally leads into religious narratives around Earth. It's only thanks to these weirdos that adopted quite absurd sounding (for the time) systems of views and values, completely without meaningful evidence at first, that we were able to gradually expand, and correct, our understanding of the universe.
And this doesn't just apply to the ancient past. Einstein's observation that the speed of light stays fixed while the rate of passage of time itself is variable, to enable the former, sounds so utterly and absolutely absurd. In many ways the real challenge in breaking through to relativity wasn't the math or anything like that (which, in fact, Einstein himself lacked when first developing the concept) but accepting that a concept that sounds so wrong might actually be right.
The difference, to my mind, between science and philosophy is that the philosophy of relativity can exist independent of such confirming evidence. But the scientific theory cannot.
It's always important, when dabbling in philosophy, to keep track of when one has wandered so far out on the branch of reason that one is no longer supported by the trunk of evidence.
""""Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”"""
... and, of course, the philosopher can argue that we are all of us tumbling through a Pachinko-machine of parallel universes, and it is only our constrained perception that suggests Man is dead; in a parallel universe, Man is just fine and living their days in the grey universe that we, through some as-yet-unphilosophized-but-don't-worry-we're-thinking-hard-about-it process, cannot exist in.
... but does that matter over-much if the observable is that ignoring zebra crossings gets you crossed out of this universe?
“Philosophy is poor at revealing truths but excellent at revealing falsehoods (or at least unsupported arguments)” was the main lesson I took from informally studying it.
the cynics, though, made a good life but that’s not because they had a better philosophy. it’s because cynicism is base/primitive logic available to the brute as well as the civilized man.
To summarize one of her points from memory, she basically lays into Rousseau about having a lot of opinions on domestic life for someone who clearly doesn't even know how to set foot in a kitchen.
I think philosophy is a noble pursuit, but it's worth noting how often people drew very broad conclusions, and then acted on them, from not very much data. Consider the dozens of theories of the constitution of the world from the time of the Greek thinkers (even the atomic theory doesn't look very much at all like atoms as we now understand them), or the myriad examples of political philosophies that ran up against people simply not acting the way the philosophy needed them to act to cohere.
The investigation of possibility is laudable, but a healthy and regular dose of evidence is important.