Philosophy: Natural and Unnatural

Physics used to be called natural philosophy, but it and other philosophy were divorced sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. Physics got the children, the house, and the bank account but philosophy still had to pay alimony. Philosophers have had a major grudge ever since.
Sean Carroll notes that Steve Hsu found this quote from philosopher Paul Feyerbend.

The withdrawal of philosophy into a "professional" shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrodinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth -- and this is the fault of the very same idea of professionalism which you are now defending.

Lumo adds some mostly insightful commentary including apposite comments by Steve Weinberg. (I say mostly, because he can't resist irrelevant rantings against Peter Woit and Lee Smolin).

Feyerbend's distain for Feynman is vindictive but hardly justified. Feynman was more contemptuous of philosophy than ignorant of it. He just didn't think that it still had anything useful to say about the world. It's probably safe to say that most scientists today would agree that the insights of philosophy are of another day.

There are some modern philosophers with a more humble attitude toward science, of course. If nothing else, some of them, say Daniel Dennett, write some good books explaining aspects of science.

Plato and Aristotle thought that the nature of the world could be apprehended by pure thought. History revised that to say that the work of pure thought could be done by mathematics, but experiments had to settle the facts. This left those philosophers who were neither mathematicians nor physicists out in the cold.

On the other hand, string theorists do seem to be going back to the "pure thought" paradigm, but most of them would still like to see some experiments.

UPDATE: Anyone interested in this subject should read the comments over at Cosmic Variance, especially this detailed and well-informed one by Lee Smolin.

Ther are other good ones too.