Eh. Most philosophy isn't hard to read, it's just really dry. I give you 300 pages about whether shadows are things. The stuff that gets attention is hard to read because it borrows from philosophers writing in French and German who got translated awkwardly into English, and people who take their work and run with it in English tend to ape the style of awkwardly translated French and German because they've read reams of it and mostly talk to people who have read reams of it. You can pick up Plato cold and get a lot out of it, but no one can make sense of Plotinus without context. Because it was the Frankfurt school running away from nazis and the may 1968 protests happened in France, the people writing what looks like gibberish are the ones working on problems that everyone cares about, and the ones writing clearly are pondering whether shadows spin.
So is the issue that modern philosophy, as a trade, does not value clarity? Because I haven't managed to find an excerpt of "are shadows things" but the summmaries... ...are almost deliberately obtuse. Did philosophers stop caring whether or not they had an audience other than philosophers?An observer is viewing a double eclipse of the sun. Traveling east is the heavenly body Far. Traveling west and nearer to him is the smaller body Near. Near is close enough to exactly compensate for its smaller size with respect to shadow formation. Near and Far look the same size from his vantage point. When Near falls exactly under the shadow of Far, it is as if one of these heavenly bodies had disappeared. Does the observer see Near or Far? The chapter's thesis is that the causal theory of perception correctly favors Far.