system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why is Alan Watts so often considered not to be an actual philosopher?

and if he isn't a philosopher, how would you describe who he is and what he does?
gpt
Some people hold that to be a philosopher now means submitting one's self to the larger scholarly community and its emphases on professionalism, public participation through speaking or writing for the professional audience, and presenting one's case in a way that's open to rigorous scrutiny as well as *responsive* to criticism. Philosophy, in this sense, is a profession one gains entry into through work specifically adopting the morals, values, practices, and society of that profession.

Some people, with understandable zeal for what philosophy encourages us to be, enforce this positioning of philosophy as a profession unwittingly as a tribal adherent, but it's not really a tribe for people who do earn their way in the profession. It's a workplace, these days, with some lasting relational issues we're working on fixing. For others, it's collegiality with peers about things that fascinate, and with some money involved for doing it. It has a lot of sentiment as a discipline.

But, assuming the professional definition, there is an element of caution about how someone outside the profession or discpline can name it, shape it, and mold how people think about it, without subjecting himself to its own professional standards and forms of life. Some people have envy of that ability, some have contempt, some ambivalent, some thankful, some indifferent, some considerate, some refusing.

'Often' is an assessment not so much of what people actually feel, only of what you're seeing. That's why we have to be cautious, since a lot of times we're seeing what we choose to see, and it's hard to choose to see silence or ambivalence or acceptance.