Lol. I don't disagree with anything you say. But the historical philosophers we study used logic and reason.
Absolutely. Well, most of them... You get someone like Nietzsche and you could make an argument that he's anti-logic - literally, you go into his notebooks and you'll find sections attacking the very basis of formal logic. Some of the sections in "Will to Power" literally argues that the law of non-contradiction is merely an expression of lack of capability rather than any true law. So reason yes - logic? No, or at least, only to the degree that it can be shown to undermine itself. Then you get philosophers like Kierkegaard who famously says "faith begins precisely where rational thinking leaves off" and he rigorously deals with the nature of the absurd. If you read his discussions on the leap of faith, you'll quickly find that reason doesn't have much to do with it, nor does logic - but then again, that's kind of his point. If you want to analyze the nature of human subjectivity, of the aesthetic which is so central to our existence, logic, reason, and objectivity themselves are simply incapable of capturing the character of these things as they are important to our lives. Also, I don't know if you've ever read the Chuang Tzu, but... Well, calling it philosophy in the modern sense is borderline, but some philosophers do examine it seriously.
The thing is, philosophy now, while it has some crazy sketchy stuff in it - some of the touchy feely philosophy that gets into the abstractions of moral relativism and what one of my profs used to call "spooky metaphysics" - as a whole, philosophy is a fairly regulated field now. Hell, it's a profession which you need very specific credentials to obtain and then your work exists within a larger academic framework. The formations of that framework were beginning centuries ago but the ability to apply it universally just wasn't there.
So yeah, we're in a thread talking about important books of philosophy which were actually discussing
magic. That doesn't happen today - at least, not in any serious sense. The worst of what actual, academic philosophy does today is leaps and bounds more well regulated than this type of thing.
Just because "the historical philosophers we read" are pretty good doesn't mean philosophy as a whole was. Ever read Newton beyond his - now thought of as - scientific treatises? There's some pretty weird stuff in there. That's what happens when you try and work formal logic into some Divine clockwork. You get philosophy of Divine Right theory, Richard Cumberland's pre-utilitarian theory and... Well, there's weird stuff going on. We just don't have it presented to us because it has been filtered out by centuries of peer review and whatnot.
