Wow, there is quite a lot in your question here. First, I think it is true that a broadly 'analytic' approach is probably dominant in the English speaking world, but I wouldn't say that all of philosophy is 'analytic'. Also, I don't think that the broadly analytic approach is reducible to 'rigorous linguistics.' Yes, there is a corner of the philosophical world that never seems to argue about anything other than linguistics, but it seems pretty clear to me that it is only a small portion of philosophy.

I still think there are important debates that are being examined.... for example in ethics compare John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue or Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, and Peter Singer's How Are We To Live? these thinkers are certainly engaging in very substantial debates. Or in philosophy of religion read J.L. Mackie's Miracle of Theism and Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God. I'm sure other panelists could come up with their own lists of substantial debates in their own specialties.

If you want to major in philosophy it is important to realize that you probably won't be solely immersed in the contemporary debates, but you should expect to be exposed to a wide variety of contemporary and historical approaches. So, you should take a look and see what your school emphasizes in their philosophy program. You can also take a look at what the professors there publish to see if they are immersed in the analytic debates you dislike.

I have struggled with similar dilemmas, as a non-believing member of a Jewish religious congregation. It looks like you have four options--(1) leave the church entirely, (2) teach in the normal fashion, (3) teach non-literally, and (4) remain in the church but don't teach.

You've made up your mind against (1), and you're struggling between (2) and (3). I think you're right to be worried about (2). It concerns me the way Sunday school teachers stand before children and present religious stories exactly as if they were history teachers or science teachers. This does exploit the credulousness of children in a way that is problematic.

It's been way too long since I read Austin, so I don't know what he says about the "backstage artiste," but I think it's fine for children to be taught that religious material is "meaningful to us" but not historically or scientifically true. The problem is that I doubt other congregants would think it's fine (unless your church is extremely liberal). So I can't imagine (3) is really a viable option.

Which leaves (4). What's wrong with continuing to be a congregant, but declining to be a Sunday school teacher? Perhaps you're thinking that it couldn't make sense to continue as a congregant if you weren't willing to participate in the church's educational programs. But much goes on in a religious organization. There's no reason why every congregant must support and be involved in every activity.

Maybe you're thinking you'd be a free rider if you didn't pitch in. "What if everybody did it?" you may be asking yourself. But in fact, it sounds to me like you'd be perfectly happy if everybody declined to be a literal Sunday school teacher (most likely the only kind you can really be). You believe it would be better if no one were exploiting the credulousness of children.

So (4) seems to me like a perfectly good option. If you do belong to an extremely liberal congregation and can get way with (3), I would rethink your doubts about it, if I were you. When I take my children to religious services, I don't think I'm going wrong in any way by telling them that the stories are meaningful to us, but not true.

Alas, probably not, especially if (a) the crowd is very large and (b) your seat would have been filled by another fan, especially if (c) that fan would have been cheering for your team and about as loudly as you. But even if a-c are not true, it's not clear how much the cheering of the fans changes the players' performances and hence the outcome of the game. On the other hand, it always amazes me how significant the home field/court advantage is in every sport, including soccer (I presume that when you said "football match" you were referring to the beautiful game, not American football). What could explain the fact that a team is at least 10% more likely to win at home than away against the same opponent? (OK, I'm making up the 10% figure, but if anything I bet it's low, and Wikipedia says in English Premier League home teams are almost 40% more likely to score goals.)

Well, several things could explain home field advantage other than the crowds, such as familiarity with the environment and not having to travel. And as far as I can tell, contributing to the crowd noise is the only chance we have of influencing the outcome of a game. Hence if a-c are true, it's not clear how you could have an influence on the outcome, barring a belief in weird causal powers (e.g., you can give the opposing players cramps by looking at them funny) or exceptional circumstances (e.g., you are close enough to yell insults at David Beckham which make him perform worse--watch out, they may make him perform better!).

On the other hand, it's kind of like voting. You should vote even if it is unlikely that your vote will make a causal difference in the outcome, because if people stopped voting based on that belief, it would make a difference. If all the fans started thinking their cheers made no difference, the overall silence would make a difference.

Anyway, I still like to believe I can influence the outcome of a game ... even by watching it on TV! Hence, there's no way I'm going to Tivo an important Duke basketball game--they need my magical energy to flow in real time! (Yes, philosophers can believe irrational things, though I'm not sure it's accurate to say I believe something I know is false, but that's a question for another day...)

One quick note on credentials. We rely on them because they are, in general, pretty reliable and they save an enormous amount of time. This bears on your question.

Suppose you applied for a beginning-level assistant professor job at my institution, having no degree. I would need to decide if it was worth the time to investigate whether you have the skills and knowledge needed, and a good deal of past experience with people from outside the academy who think of themselves as philosophers would make it a poor bet. You would probably get sorted very quickly to the "Reject" file in the triage process. That might be a mistake. But academics, like most everyone else, are busy people, and given the (literally) hundreds of applications that a job ad might generate, we have no serious choice but to rely on heuristics of this sort. We'd also wonder -- if we got around to it -- whether anyone who claims to be so averse to the academy as a student is likely to do well there as a faculty member.

That said, it's possible to get published even if you have no institutional address, and it occasionally happens. If I were trying to do that, I'd pick journals that have a blind refereeing policy. But before I submitted, I'd want to get some preliminary feedback from people in the field. And if you are averse to the academy, that might not be easy either.

Please bear in mind: none of this is about you in particular. You might be very talented at analytic philosophy, and I'm not suggesting otherwise. It's my description of the way most of us operate and the reasons why. But it leaves you in a tough spot.

One possible strategy: if you've read a recent piece in a journal, for example, and you have some crisp, compelling thoughts to offer, you might try emailing the author with a brief version of what you're thinking. If you are, indeed, talented at analytic philosophy, you might well be able to do that in a way that piques the author's interest. And that might give you at least a foot in the door to the circle of professional philosophers.

I think that only a genius would have a chance at getting a philosophy job without a graduate degree. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but if you are going to invest years into trying to make this happen you need to know what you are up against.

When you apply to a philosophy position, your application will generally be in a stack of 100-200 applications. If you don't have the traditional credentials via a degree your publications and letters of rec will have to be unambiguously BETTER than just about everyone else's in the stack (being as good as everyone else won't be enough). Furthermore, your lack of academic affiliation will be an extra barrier to getting those publications and letters. Yes, some venues use blind review, but not all do. Even if you could get a couple of respectable letter writers, you would need to get them to give you clear, very strong recommendations and say that you are as good as the top students in the programs they teach in.

At some schools it may be simply illegal or against policy to hire you without a degree. Other schools may wonder if someone so adverse to academia would be a good teacher or have the experience necessary to teach well. Yet other schools might wonder if you have an attitude problem (I don't think that you do... I'm just saying that someone else might).

If you were a genius who could consistently publish multiple articles in the very top journals, you might be able to pull it off. But, my advice is that if you want to be a philosophy professor then learn to tolerate the classroom enough to get a degree. Your odds of a successful career will increase tremendously (though even then it might be difficult...it is a difficult market for everyone).

To a certain extent I think you need to think about what it is about the academy that you so dislike. You seem to want to teach in the academy but not gain credentials there, yet of course as you know in order to teach you first of all need to be taught. Certainly you could write good stuff and it would get published, no problem there, but I wonder if you could be a decent teacher without having had the experience of being a student. One aspect of teaching that you ignore is that it involves more than just knowing your subject. I have met several very skilled philosophers who just cannot teach and some of them at least do not, they could not enter the profession due to their inability to succeed in this area of work, and since there are very few posts in philosophy which just involve research, there is not much they can do.

In the past it was generally accepted that philosophers would earn their livelihood doing something else, and it is really only from Kant onwards that we get the professional philosopher. This might be an option worth exploring.

The answer to your question will depend on what counts as a fact.

Certainly it is possible for people to observe the same state of affairs while reacting to it differently. You observe the same wallpaper as I do, but you like it while I hate it. Or we both observe the same behavior on the part of a friend, but you find it wierd while I find it normal.

On the other hand, if the likability of the wallpaper is itself a fact that you (alledgedly) observe, then you and I do disagree about the facts when I find it hateful. Likewise, if the wierdness of a friend's behavior counts as a fact.

Rather than argue over what counts as a fact, it is probably best to recognize that different people will focus on different facts (without disputing the facts that others focus on), and that different people will value the same facts in different ways (without disputing others' descriptions of what they value). This does not mean that our focus of attention or our valuation is purely subjective, or that attention and valuation are not themselves matters for rational dispute; it only means that it is often useful to distinguish between the facts that people agree on and the ways in which they approach these facts differently.

To give a similar but somewhat different answer, one might think the problem with the line of reasoning in the question comes here: "But it seems bizarre to say that Russell's invention of the theory of types entails that Bush is the 43rd president...". We were talking about the statement, "If Russell invented the theory of types, then Bush was the 43d president", and now we're talking about entailment? Why? What do these have to do with each other?

The move from talking about the truth of conditionals to talking about entailment is what lies, in many ways, behind the invention of (formal) modal logic, by Lewis and Langford in the 1920s. One of the central ambitions of early modal logic was to formalize the notion of entailment. It was with reference to this that Quine spoke of modal logic's being "conceived in sin, the sin of confusing use and mention"---of confusing "if p then q" with "`p' entails `q'".

Now, that said, it is undoubtedly a serious question whether the English indicative conditional, "if p, then q", is properly understood as material. Note that this is an empirical question about how English actually works. It could have worked so that "if...then..." was material; if it doesn't, then that is a contingent fact. The great majority of semanticsts these days would suppose that the English conditional was not material, but the literature on conditionals is extremely complicated. There's an old book called If p, Then q, by David Sanford, which is still a good introduction.

From what I recall (and I'm recalling going to a US highschool way back in the 20th century), there's quite a bit to the semiotics of hickeys. The bruise says something--to you personally, but also to the world (if you hair is mobile). It broadcasts "I have a boyfriend and we're intimate," but it also hints at sex to the point of hurting. Maybe your parents have concerns about the broadcasting, or about "to the point of hurting." Maybe they're wondering "what next?" Maybe... Well, you could speculate endlessly. There's no way to know without asking them. You might discover that they're worried not so much about morality but about your emotional and physical health.

This isn't going to be a response from a different perspective from Peter Smith's, but I have a little information to add. First of all, William Lane Craig has debated a lot of philosophers over the last fifteen or so years, including a couple of the contributors to Philosophers Without Gods (Edwin Curley, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and myself). I won't try to give the roster for fear of offending someone I've left out -- but you can find some transcripts of some of the debates on Craig's website: http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/menus/debates.html (Mine didn't make the cut! If you're interested, you can watch it through the Veritas Forum: http://www.veritas.org/media/talks/639) . Craig's debate with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong became a book: God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist (Oxford University Press) and Sinnott-Armstrong has another book on the relation between religion and ethics: Morality Without God (also Oxford). Robert Garcia and Nathan King edited a book focused on the debate between Craig and Paul Kurtz, called Is Goodness Without God Good Enough? (Rowman and Littlefield). (Full disclosure: I have an essay in there)

I don't know about renaissances (renaissanci?), but I would hardly say that the Anglo-American world has been "transformed" by anything that's happened in philosophy during Craig's or my lifetime. One thing that has been happening recently that may be a good thing -- it is from my point of view, anyway -- is that Christian philosophers and atheist philosophers are talking to each other. I think that Dr. Craig can take some credit for that development. Robert Garcia and Nat King can, too. I recently attended a conference at Notre Dame devoted to the question whether the God of the Tenach (what Christians call the "Old Testament") is morally good. I was one of three atheists invited to speak -- Ed Curley and Evan Fales being the others -- and although we were vastly outnumbered, I was most gratified by the reception we received. None of us pulled any punches, but we were still greeted with respectful questions and constructive criticisms. I don't think any minds were changed regarding the metaphysical facts, but I do think some stereotypes were smashed, and some atheist-Christian friendships were formed. The conference papers and commentaries have been collected into a book by the conference organizers, Michaels Rea, Murray, and Murphy.

I can't finish my list of credits without mentioning my once-colleague, Michael Martin, who is now Professor Emeritus at Boston University. He's been writing on atheism for many years, long before it was "in." See, for example, his Atheism, Morality, and Meaning (Prometheus)

Oh, and thanks for the plug, Peter!

It is probably fair to say that William Lane Craig (WLC) is making an overstatement. But, the truth that he is overstating is that in the mid-20th century Anglo-American philosophy there was little or no influential new work in Christian philosophy and now there is quite a bit, including some that is published by the most reputable secular academic presses. To cite just a few examples consider: Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God & The Coherence of Theism (both by Oxford University Press(OUP)), Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief (OUP) & God and Other Minds (Cornell UP), Nicholas Wolterstorff's Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge UP), William Alston's Perceiving God (Cornell UP), Eleonore Stump's Reasoned Faith (Cornell UP), and Alexander Pruss's The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Reassessment (Cambridge UP).

Oxford and Cambridge University Presses are largely viewed as the two most respected publishers of philosophy in general and Cornell University Press is largely acknowledged as a top press in philosophy of religion. So, even though the philosophical world may not have been 'utterly transformed' I find it easy to agree with WLC that there is a lot more Christian philosophy being done than in the mid-20th century and that much of it is being accepted by the very best academic presses as respectable philosophical work.

Note that WLC's claim also has to do with areas besides philosophy of religion. There are philosophers developing comprehensive distinctly Christian projects in areas like metaphysics (Dean Zimmerman comes to mind) and ethics (where Alasdair MacIntyre has been quite influential). Although I hesitate to include my own work along with that of these more influential thinkers, some of my own work might be viewed as a 'distinctly Christian ethical project.' For example, my book on The Prudence of Love advocates an account of the virtue of love developed from the views of Aquinas. However, I go on to demonstrate that possessing this virtue of love is beneficial to the lover on all major views of happiness (including very secular views). Projects like these are far more common today than they were in the mid-twentieth century.

Dr. Craig has written or edited about thirty books and over a hundred articles. He is the only theist with a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. His work on the Kalam cosmological argument and Molinism is excellent. Yet, much of his work is published by less rigorous venues and he has not published much in the top academic presses mentioned above. So, I'd say that he's generally viewed as a good philosopher, though perhaps not as good as those I've listed above.

One atheist who doesn't get as much attention as he should is William Rowe who has excellent books on the Problem of Evil and the Cosmological Argument. And as others have mentioned, JL Mackie's Miracle of Theism is top notch.