There are two types of philosophers: Those who heed the pull of Indra's net, and those who don't. This is determinative for the two ways to fail to understand the central mysteries of mind.

What is Indra's net? Say you want to understand what explanation is. The correct answer is something in the genre of: "An explanation of X to a mind is something that, given that mind's preexisting mental elements, makes that mind able to more skillfully deal with X and things like X.". But this answer calls on other very whole-mind-laden concepts such as "existing mental elements" and "skillfully". And, this answer is founded on the whole concept of a mind. The answer takes seriously that something like "explanation" must refer one back to many other mental elements, and to mind in general. It takes seriously that we have low arthrodiatomicity (joint-carving-ness) in our concepts about mind; and that the territory itself is jumbled together, in that many crucial mental elements are (perhaps essentially) provisional or (perhaps essentially) diasystemic and that we are created in motion, e.g. with values and beliefs never yet having been separated out from each other.

What is Indra's net? It's that properly questioning or understanding mental things leads to a mess of questioning and understanding mentality and many other mental things.

Philosophers who don't heed the pull of Indra's net will insecurely gravitate to ordinary science and math. (Not that there's anything wrong with ordinary science and math. And not that one can't or shouldn't ever do science and math as part of a real philosophical inquiry. I'm just saying, this is what people actually do.) They almost inevitably produce bad philosophy. See "Koan: divining alien datastructures from RAM activations".

Philosophers who do heed the pull of Indra's net will get stuck in Wittgenstein's tarpit. They might make progress. But it will be very slow and halting, and difficult to share.

This is why philosophy doesn't get too much of anywhere.