In part, philosophers have no one but themselves to blame for the low state to which their discipline has fallen—thanks especially to the logical positivist and analytic strain that has been dominant for about a century in the English-speaking world. For example, the influential twentieth-century American philosopher W.V.O. Quine spoke modestly of a “philosophy continuous with science” and vowed to eschew philosophy’s traditional concern with metaphysical questions that might claim to sit in judgment on the natural sciences. Science, Quine and many of his contemporaries seemed to say, is where the real action is, while philosophers ought to celebrate science from the sidelines.
(Austin L. Hughes, "The Folly of Scientism," The New Atlantis [fall 2012]: 32-50, at 35)
Note from KBJ: Quine was wrong. Philosophy is not "continuous with science." Science is a first-order discipline, the aim of which is to discover how things are in the natural world. It has its own concepts, methods, and argumentative standards. Philosophy is a second-order discipline that takes first-order disciplines such as science as its subject matter. It, too, has its own concepts, methods, and argumentative standards. (Any overlap is accidental.) Many philosophers are in love with science to the point where they think philosophy is continuous with, or even a part of, science. What they don't realize is that scientists don't see it that way. Many scientists view philosophy as a useless (and even counterproductive) enterprise. A true philosopher is critical of science, not enamored of it. A true philosopher seeks to show just where and why science ends and other fields, such as theology and philosophy, begin. A true philosopher is as skeptical about the claims of science as he or she is about the claims of law, morality, or religion. A true philosopher would be wary of linkages between science and state.
