[darkmighty]

More like, philosophy is the extreme version of the 'Uncategorized' box of science -- it's almost the leftover pile which gets slowly picked up and put into neat boxes of knowledge. Mechanical nature of life was once philosophical musings, now is biology. Atomic nature of matter were philosophical musings, now physics. Nature of consciousness is now philosophy, will sooner or later become neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

Philosophy isn't useless. It is a ground for preliminary discussion before the matter is ready to shift into more solid ground -- mathematics, logic, or hard sciences.

That it suffers from (a degree of) infinite dwelling on pointless topics is inevitable, because it is very hard to judge what will one day be useful or legitimate of discussion; making the false positive nil will increase the false negatives too much. Plus if philosophy decided on a too strict topic regime, soon another field would be born to house the outcasts of academic philosophy, thus becoming the new leftover pile of reason.

[andrepd]

>Nature of consciousness is now philosophy, will sooner or later become neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

You speculate so.

[yabb]

Pretty much this. It's like pre-science. I could see how a lot of modern philosophy could be rehashing issues that have already been extensively formalized though

[andrepd]

There is plenty of knowledge that is non-scientific. Not all knowledge is accessible through the scientific method. Ethics, metaphysics, etc.

[jacobush]

That is the most frank yet loving description of philosophy I have read. Bookmarked.