> I haven't left philosophy because everyone in it is stupid, as this article seems to suggest. I left philosophy because after all my reading, note-taking, class-discussioning, and debate tournamenting, I never felt like I'd made any progress, and that mattered to me personally. At the end of the day, the questions that were hard to answer were still unsolved, and the gray ethical areas were still gray. This is why I don't do philosophy, and I why I found the science bug.
I get your point, but for all intents and purposes that's one of the things that makes philosophy great, i.e. the fact that Heraclitus's sayings are as actual today as they were 2,500 years ago. You'll also have to agree that deciding once and for all (or "proving" by scientific means) what makes as taking "moral" decisions, or if "morals" even exist at all, or what makes us not kill each other once we've stopped believing in gods etc., is better left "unresolved", because this "philosophical quest" is what makes us humans.
Asking a fundamental question is simple. It's the answers that are hard, just like in science. Go back to the pre-Socratics and you can find questions that are clear precursors to modern questions in science about things like causality, block time, the nature of matter or consciousness. We're still trying to find out. We've gotten unbelievably better and we still don't have firm answers. Philosophers throughout history posed questions that at the time science didn't have the capability to answer, but was able to narrow down the possibilities simply by carefully analyzing the question, producing thought experiments, etc. This cut the workload down for science tremendously by eliminating red herrings and logical impossibilities, and in turn science answered questions through testing of the physical world that philosophy could not, thereby narrowing the workload of philosophy. (I see this very prominently in the theory of Mind.) Science and Philosophy are often complementary practices.
I also think philosophy can help science in areas that do affect us but are probably untestable. I remember reading some work in primitivism that speculates that the introduction of the clock, and its conception of time, to humanity fundamentally changed the nature of consciousness. People literally thought differently before the clock became common. If this is true, it has ramifications for how we understand the past and things that people did in it that affect us today. So maybe philosophy helps us with questions of history in a way that science (at least currently, at least in my conception) cannot.
If the point isn't to "improve" but for each generation of humans to keep asking the same questions and to live with their own answers, what's wrong with not "improving"?
I get your point, but for all intents and purposes that's one of the things that makes philosophy great, i.e. the fact that Heraclitus's sayings are as actual today as they were 2,500 years ago. You'll also have to agree that deciding once and for all (or "proving" by scientific means) what makes as taking "moral" decisions, or if "morals" even exist at all, or what makes us not kill each other once we've stopped believing in gods etc., is better left "unresolved", because this "philosophical quest" is what makes us humans.