All good advice, to which I'll add the following. The more time and effort you've invested in developing and defending a position, the harder it can be to recognize or appreciate objections to it. It often helps to step away from the view you're defending and ask, "What if this view is just dead wrong?" If you then provisionally switch sides and go into attack mode against your baby, you can do it without the fear and anxiety that otherwise tends to cloud your judgement. Once you get past the fear factor, you can see everything more clearly. And if it turns out your baby is a dark changeling, that's OK! Since you've spent so much time defending the position, you know all its secret vulnerabilities, meaning you're in an excellent position to refute it, which is a valuable service to the profession, if the position was worth talking about to begin with.
All good advice, to which I'll add the following. The more time and effort you've invested in developing and defending a position, the harder it can be to recognize or appreciate objections to it. It often helps to step away from the view you're defending and ask, "What if this view is just dead wrong?" If you then provisionally switch sides and go into attack mode against your baby, you can do it without the fear and anxiety that otherwise tends to cloud your judgement. Once you get past the fear factor, you can see everything more clearly. And if it turns out your baby is a dark changeling, that's OK! Since you've spent so much time defending the position, you know all its secret vulnerabilities, meaning you're in an excellent position to refute it, which is a valuable service to the profession, if the position was worth talking about to begin with.
Some good advice here. Well done.
Here's most of the answers, you can drop the academic façade: https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/metaphysics-in-a-nutshell
If you think the most influential philosophers are not necessarily the best, what's your top 10 philosophers?