In his essay The Claims of Philosophy, A.J. Ayer divided philosophers into two categories: journeymen and pontiffs. He was one of the former, and proud of it. One of the interesting things about both styles of doing philosophy, though, is that both rub up raw against our expectations of philosophers:

Surely, the business of the philosopher is to make clear the meaning of life, to show people how they ought to live. Call him a pontiff or a journeyman, according to his method of approach; the distinction is not of any great importance. What is important is the message that he has to give. It is wisdom that is needed, no merely scientific knowledge. Of what use to us is the understanding of nature if we do not know the purpose of our existence or how we ought to live? And who is to answer these supremely important questions if not the philosopher?

Good points, this challenge to the philosophical status quo. But hey: Ayer has an answer:

The reply to this is that there is no true answer to these questions; and since this is so it is no use expecting even the philosopher to provide one. What can be done, however, is to make clear why, and in what sense, these questions are unanswerable; and once this is achieved it will be seen that there is also a sense in which they can be answered. It will be found that the form of answer is not a proposition, which must be either true or false, but the adoption of a rule, which cannot be properly characterized as either true or false, but can nevertheless be judged as more or less acceptable. And with this the problem is solved, so far as reasoning can solve it. The rest if a matter of personal decision, and ultimately of action.

Though I think things are a bit more complicated than Ayer makes out, this, too, is my position.

But really, the idea that philosophers qua philosohers should only concern themselves with truth, and (by manifest technique) nothing else, strikes me as his strangest limiter. Solving the problem of actions and rules, by reasoning of various sorts, is quite a task, and even if truth is not the ultimate goal (co-ordinated felicity, perhaps, is), those other goals are worthy of a philosopher, and philosophers surely have important things to say about them. Even in proposition form.

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