You might look at some philosophers' autobiographies. Some of these are disappointing, but two that aren't are John Stuart Mill's Autobiography and Anthony Kenny's A Path from Rome .

You have put it very well: exposing those mysteries is a deep pleasure of philosophy. That is one of the reasons that the great skeptical arguments -- arguments that seem to show that we have no reason to believe anything we have not seen, or anything outside ourselves, or even that our thoughts have any content -- are fascinating. They do cause a chill up the spine. The feeling of having solved the problem (a feeling I rarely have) is difficult to compare with the feeling of wonder at the problem. But if you are by disposition a philosopher you will not be inclined to wallow in the wonder; instead it will drive you to try to solve the problem.

Maybe 'the true and complete theory of mind' would be too difficult for us to understand or to understand fully, but if so this is not because we would be using our minds to try to understand the theory of mind, but just because the theory was too difficult for us. Just as there is no paradox in using your eyes to look at your eyes (with the help of a mirror), there is no paradox in using your mind to understand your mind.

On one view of time, the future is as real now as the present or the past, much as other places are as real as the place you happen to be; on another view the future is not yet real but will be. Either way, many philosophers would say that we can know some things about it, though Hume's great sceptical argument against induction attacks this idea. But Hume's argument is not especially about the future: it applies to any inference from what we have observed to what we have not observed, whether what we have not observed is in the future, present or past. In any event, it's not very surprising that we believe we can know something about the future, since we have so often formed expectations that we have subsequently found to be satisfied.

Nominalism is the view that everything that exists is particular. Thus there is no property of being red that all red things share (though there is the word 'red' that we apply to various things).

One of my favourites is from Santayana, who says that the present is like a fire that runs along the fuse of time. That captures our sense of past, present and future each having a different ontological status, an intuitive view that philosophers have not found easy to defend or even to make very clear.

Sean Greenberg rightly says that the absence of physical constraint does not guarantee freedom. Moreover, as Harry Frankfurt has plausibly claimed, absence of physical constraint isn't even necessary for free will, though it is necessary for freedom. If I start out with free will, you don't take it away from me just by putting me in prison, though you do take away my freedom.

I share Richard Heck's sentiments on this matter, and I would add that there is an additional sense in which a lot of philosophy is 'before science'. I'm thinking primarily about epistemology and metaphysics in the philosophy of science, where we are trying to work out how science works and what attitude we ought to take towards scientific claims. Insofar as one takes science seriously, it is natural also to take seriously these 'before' questions, however incomplete and inconclusive our answers to them may be.

Here is one reason. A central task of philosophy is to figure out how our knowledge-seeking activities work and what they achieve. That is epistemology and it is, for example, a big part of the philosophy of science. So if you think that philosophy is in the knowledge-seeking business, then it is natural to be interested also in how that activity works and what it achieves.

An epiphenomenon is something that is real and has a cause, but does not in turn go on to cause other things. A common simile is that it is like the smoke coming out of the locomotive. Thus in the philosophy of mind epiphenomenalism is the view that experiences are caused by physical states of the brain, but do not in turn cause anything: they are just the smoke the brain gives off while it is working.