I don't think that's fair, any more than it would be fair to say mathematics is the hypothesis phase either. Mathematics might be used to build scientific theor

I don't think that's fair, any more than it would be fair to say mathematics is the hypothesis phase either. Mathematics might be used to build scientific theories, but mathematics itself is self-contained and doesn't need to reference the physical world at all. The goals of mathematics, the methods mathematicians use and the results they produce are largely orthogonal to the physical world. This might be less true for areas of applied math, but that just shows how the boundaries of any field are fuzzy. The same for philosophy: most of it deals with questions—and, subsequently, arguments and answers—that are fundamentally distinct from science. There are certain areas classically part of philosophy that have become the subject of physics or psychology or the social sciences, but these parts do not characterize philosophy as a whole.