The thing is with philosophy is that it is not a science and there is no right or wrong, everything is theory.
Um. No! Or course there is right and wrong in philosophy. For instance, formal logic is part of philosophy (though some are trying to make it a discipline unto itself, divorcing it from philosophy), and there sure is right and wrong there! Wrongs are often called fallacies, and rights are often called valid arguments.
Consider this: practically everyone starts off as a relativist when they're an undergrad, but abandon it soon after. It even has a name: student relativism. It's an unthought opinion. Once you think about it, you abandon it. I could go on, about how I've never met a philosopher who thinks determinism isn't true (though there are compatibilists who think free will is compatible with determinism). About how no one believes anymore in Plato's "knowledge is justified true belief", after Gettier's seminal one-page-long paper that changed the whole discipline. Etc. Philosophy is really much closer to, say, something like mathematics than people would like to think. It's definitely not a 'free-for-all' or 'anything goes'.
The hijacking of philosophical discussions by those that think big words and fancy terms are what makes something important have missed the entire point of philosophy as a personal guiding set of principles.
It has gotten so bad that now, rather than people thinking through how they should and should not live their lives and the consequences of their actions, they outsource the thinking to an authority.
Philosophy certainly teaches you to think for yourself. We even have a fallacy called 'appeal to authority'! But like anything else in life, if I devote my life to thinking about a subject, I'm likely going to become better at it than someone who hasn't. I was just watching this today and found it interesting, and I just remembered it now cos evidently James isn't as good at thinking about his own beliefs as Anthony is. This is just how it is. The harsh truth, let's say. Like Berkeley said, 'few men think, yet all will have an opinion'.
Philosophy, like any other discipline, rewards hard work. And in this case hard work means 1. thinking for yourself and 2. caring about what everyone else thinks and has thought. I can't think of anything more egalitarian than that.
RE: A romantic at mind