Right. To go on, the people attacking philosophy have tended to ignore history. Historically, many topics started out as curiosities of philosophers in academi

Right. To go on, the people attacking philosophy have tended to ignore history. Historically, many topics started out as curiosities of philosophers in academia before branching out into their own areas/departments. (Today's scientists would have all been natural philosophers far back in history, as I recall.) I think the original subjects could be typified as religion, math, and philosophy. It's going to be easy to say philosophy is worthless if you're neglecting the contributions to knowledge it's made in the past through branching off whole areas of study. It's like removing all the fruit from a tree and then saying the tree is useless because there's no fruit on it. It's worse, of course, since without a theory of why things are done or reasoned or calculated the way they are then disciplines like engineering or statistics (for instance) reduce to theory-less plug-and-chug. Enter the world of p-value hacking and other poor, faulty applications of routine sans underlying reasoning.