Philosophy is not irrelevant. But it may play a different role than it once did.

I’m a cognitive scientist — my academic background includes a mush of philosophy, psychology, computer science, neuroscience, and a whole bunch of other fields. Sometimes, I think the result is that I don’t actually know where the lines should be drawn between disciplines — what counts as philosophy? Who counts as a philosopher? I’ve read books by people who clearly think about all sorts of hard questions and write really interesting explorations of theories, often thoroughly backed up by empirical data, but who don’t run experiments themselves — they’ve often been labeled as philosophers.

I’ve heard some folks argue that science *is* philosophy in that science is applied empirical skepticism, or that philosophy leads to science. Either way, philosophy’s not irrelevant as a field. Are some subtopics of philosophy now irrelevant, and irrelevant to science specifically? Probably so. But definitely not all of them.

What do you think?