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Johnicholas comments on Formalizing informal logic - Less Wrong
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Yes, these are old ideas. Argument diagramming (in a more complex form) was advocated by Wigmore in 1931, and N.G. de Bruijn developed Automath in 1968.
My guess is that many people read and write arguments (e.g. on this site) using text, and only bring out a scrap of paper or a calculator app on special occasions.
There are very capable research tools like SOAR, Twelf, or Prover9 (and this list is nowhere near exhaustive). If you have a workflow for using a more modern automated reasoning tool to understand/improve natural-language, "philosophical" arguments, please do post it.
See cousin_it's previous post on the formalization of mathematics. As I stated in a comment in that thread, formalized mathematics tools are still extremely primitive from a HCI standpoint.
Unfortunately, philosophical arguments are not likely to be amenable to formalized reasoning. Paul Graham has pointed this out in one of his essays:
These tools are definitely very primitive. If you look at it from a "glass is half full" standpoint, that is a good thing - it means nobody else has gotten there first! :)