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peterward 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.
I agree with the general argument. I think (some) philosophy is an immature science, or predecessor to a science, and some is in reference to how to do things better, therefore subject to less stringent, but not fundamentally different, standards than science--political philosophy, say (assuming, counterfactually, political thinking were remotely rational). And of course a lot of philosophy is just nonsense--probably most of it. But economics can hardly be called a science. If anything, the "field" has experienced retrograde evolution since it stopped being part of philosophy.