system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Writing philosophy without a degree?

I've studied philosophy most of my life, and at one time I was being encouraged by a philosophy professor at my local college to persue a degree. It wasn't in the cards financially, but I haven't let that dissuade me from my studies over the years. You could say it's in my blood.

Anyway, my wife and I are now Kampgrounds of America workers. We live in our rv and travel the country. This job affords me the opportunity to devote more time to my studies and writing than ever before.

My greater question is this,

Is it feasible to write philosophy and get published as a layman if you show yourself to be a clear, clever and rigorous thinker/writer who is well read?

Clearly there have been others who have done so all throughout history, but I am ignorant of the current climate. I have a project in the proximity of theory of mind/information theory that so far from what I have read, appears to be unique.
gpt
There is only one way to get a paper published - get it past peer review at a journal.  Doing this requires a combination of skills, and certainly those skills include being a clear, clever, and rigorous thinker/writer who is well read.

Yet, there is lots of clear, clever, and rigorous writing which wouldn't get published in any philosophy journal (or any journal at all) because it's just the wrong sort of stuff for any particular academic journal.

Journals are conversations, and if you've ever seen someone walk into even a casual conversation and try to change the subject then you know that conversations, even casual ones, have rules which are not easily communicated to people who hope to join in.  (To borrow from Walter Sobchak, new conversants often lack "a frame of reference.")  Students in graduate programs (ideally) learn how to think rigorously and how to read the history of philosophy, but they also learn (through doing) how to be conversants.

This is one way in which the autodidact is sometimes at a disadvantage, especially when the autodidact proposes something "unique."  Contributions need to be both unique to the field *and* in conversation with the field.  Yet, they are not in the field and so they may not be familiar with the conversation.  A person can, of course, get up to speed on the conversation (it's not a secret, it's in the journals and the conferences, etc.)

The conversation has a certain form and accepts certain kinds of content, so getting to know both of these is very important.  They can be learned outside of graduate programs (again, they are not secrets), but having guides in such a venture is pretty invaluable.