I am not an arbiter of what philosophy is, but it is not bad science. There is no empirical step in philosophy at all. Science requires an empirical step. You

I am not an arbiter of what philosophy is, but it is not bad science. There is no empirical step in philosophy at all. Science requires an empirical step. You have to take science to date into account. If you do not, you will be proven wrong immediately. You will say 'I think the universe is composed entirely of jelly beans', and I will say 'y experiment disproves that'. If there is an empirical way to answer a question, you should use it. Empiricism works well because it is very convincing. A lot of the time, you do not have an empirical way to answer your question, because the technology doesn't exist, or the terminology for the question that you want to ask doesn't exist, or you haven't yet adequately specified what the question is. At its best, it should be the building of a rational, informed, theory about a conceivable hypothetical situation, and rational explorations of the implications of that hypothetical.