Who is a philosopher: as in what attributes (not necessarily innate) does it take to be an academic philosopher?
I think the question is a good and legitimate for this site variant on "who is a philosopher". And I think it makes sense, that philosophy can be done and isn't just a reasonably intelligent person who has read a lot of books. In the same way that physicists can have practical knowledge:
I mean something more than possess a description or a map of it; anybody who has a quantum mechanics textbook on their shelf has that. I mean know your way around it in the way you know your way around the city in which you live. This is a practical kind of knowledge that comes in degrees and it is best acquired by learning to solve problems of the form: How do I get from A to B? Can I get there without passing through C? And what is the shortest route? Graduate students in physics spend long years gaining familiarity with the nooks and crannies of Hilbert space, locating familiar landmarks, treading its beaten paths, learning where secret passages and dead ends lie, and developing a sense of the overall lay of the land. They learn how to navigate Hilbert space in the way a cab driver learns to navigate his city.
All I know is that I could never be a philosopher due to impatience with trivia, and a reasonably poor memory. I'm asking because there's so much talk about "not doing philosophy" here and I wondered if I even could, aside from the reasons just stated I mean.