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Wei_Dai comments on Metaphilosophical Mysteries - Less Wrong
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One "interesting" thing about philosophy seems to be that as soon as a philosophical issue gets a definitive answer, it ceases to be part of philosophy and instead becomes either mathematics or science. For example, physical sciences were once "natural philosophy". Many social sciences were also once the domain of philosophy; economics, oddly enough, first developed as an offshoot of moral philosophy, and "philosophy of mind" predates the practice of psychology, cognitive science, neurobiology, and the badly-named "computer science" (which is really just a branch of mathematics).
Philosophy seems to be roughly equivalent to the study of confusing questions; when a question is no longer confusing, it stops being philosophy and instead becomes something else.
Agreed, and I think that accounts for the reputation philosophy has for not being productive. People see the confusion and slow progress in the fields that are still thought of as philosophy, and forget that philosophical progress is what allowed many fields to become mathematics or science.