Science-Philosophy Debate

Science is philosophy, albeit just a branch of it- specifically the part concerned with learning how the universe works physically.Other branches of philosophy study other things, and are good at understanding those things they are about. Moreover, philosophy has progressed and branched out quite a bit since those philosophers you mentioned. I spend a lot of time reading philosophy for fun, and have found many of the ideas practically useful in regular life- but am not a fan of any of the phi

Science is when you try to answer questions about evidence, with evidence.Philosophy is when you try to answer questions about definitions/language, with definitions/language.That doesn't make philosophy useless. It just makes philosophy one part of the system -- a lot of times philosophy generates questions and ideas which are later addressed in a scientific way. It's a useful tool; be careful not to either overvalue or undervalue it. (Likewise, AFAIK no important s

I think this comes from a misunderstanding of what philosophy is. Philosophy is not a science, and can never become one without threatening its current epistemic/ontological role -- objects like falsification, Quine's "best science", proof by contradiction, and argumentation from necessity exist as a substrate for scientific reasoning, and so repositioning them as objects of the science they support would involve circular reasoning[1].Put another way: to "lift&

Not quite.The philosophical sciences (I use this word in the classical sense, not the narrow modern/Anglo-American sense) can be said to couple the deductive rigor of math with general empirical observation. For example, consider metaphysics. Metaphysics often begins from very basic and general observations like "things change", observations that, btw, everyone generally presupposes, including the empirical scientist. From these observations, we can infer what must be true abou

Ironic that science is a subset of philosophy.

You're describing the scientific method. Philosophy is not for "understanding the universe". Surely it cannot be blamed for not fulfilling a goal you only imagine it to have.

You are missing the forest for the trees here. Philosophy as a field is not about any of the individual ideas explored by any school of thought or individual philosopher. Philosophy is about constructing systems of thought and exploring them. Science, as a methodology, is but one of these systems it produced that happend to end up being very useful. But comparing the 2 is comparing apples and oranges. Like comparing all of philosophy to utilitarianism or the like.

I actually generally agree with your assessment here. Modern things that are generally labeled as 'philosophy' and only 'philosophy' are rather abstract and with very little clarity as to their usefulness. Most of the useful philosophical ideas were indeed established back before science was fully autonomous, but even as recently as the works of sir Karl Popper (1902-1994; the father of the idea that scientific theories must be 'falsifiable') have had a very

yes, lots of philosophy and little actual science (testing hypotheses etc)

Isn't philosophy the mother of science?