I've always been curious how philosophy ended up with such a bad rap here. My pet theory is that a lot of the "philosophy" that comes onto the popular radar is

I've always been curious how philosophy ended up with such a bad rap here. My pet theory is that a lot of the "philosophy" that comes onto the popular radar is terrible (and imo barely philosophy at all -- but that may be a No True Scotsman). > I distrust a field of study which proposes to produce something which amounts to a placeholder until scientists do the real, hard work. This is one of the more common criticisms, motivated (as far as I can tell) by some idea that philosophers are stubborn in the face of empirical evidence. This has not been my experience -- almost all working philosophers understand well the scope of their arguments, and most limit themselves along the lines of: "if the evidence bears out X, then Y...". They don't attempt to claim what is true while we wait for the evidence to prove it, but rather to point out what things cannot be true (due to logical inconsistency), and to clarify what concepts are the most useful to talk about in the meantime (in terms of expressive power). To me, it's a bit like pure math: you can build some interesting structure and prove some facts about it, and while that structure may not be useful in explaining anything about the natural world, the facts you proved about the structure itself are still true regardless. Likewise, the evidence may not bear out, say, Libertarian conceptions of free will -- but if they should, Robert Kane has done some good work determining what else is necessarily true, and what implications this might have for some of the "other hazy constructs". (He's proven some facts about that structure)