[devinhelton]

It seems what happened is that all the promising/useful areas of inquiry from ancient philosophy have since become their own fields. "Natural philosophy" became physics/biology/chemistry and so forth. Thus university philosophy departments were basically left with the dregs -- lots of debates over non-falsifiable claims, lots of debates caused by poor definitions of words. Ethics is the only subfield of modern philosophy I can think of that seems useful and interesting to me. Maybe political philosophy too, but that has mainly moved to the political science department.

[zwkrt]

doesn't it seem like hubris to assume that philosophy has stopped producing "successful" fields? Computer science broke off less than 100 years ago...

[foldr]

And one might add that the branching off point was some extremely esoteric work in the foundations of mathematics and philosophy of language that would have struck most people at the time as entirely speculative and useless.