Is Philosophy an Art?

Science and logic attempt to describe something central to the universe while religion and aesthetics are central to only the human experience. To place the two in the same box is a huge category error akin trying to scientifically derive creationism.

Philosophy is essentially just a mish mash of deep thoughts and ponderings of unrelated topics. There is no deeper overarching connection here. Academia came to realize later that certain deep thoughts were “better” then others and formalized those deep thoughts into math and science.

Historically things like science and math and logic comes from “philosophy” but ultimately philosophy is just an old way of thinking in the sense that we as humans now have enough information to understand that aesthetics, religion and science don’t belong in the same category. Philosophy is a outmoded concept that only is still around for the same reason technical debt in software is still around.

The inevitable philosophers response to this is that all experience is technically human in nature. We cannot experience the universe without human bias injected into the observation thus it is not a category error to place Christianity in a field side by side with number theory because it’s all human made up stuff anyway.

To which I respond that all of academia is structured around hypothetical axioms. We can’t prove anything is real but we assume it’s all real. We can’t prove that there is any other way to experience the universe outside of the human experience yet we still assume and structure our science such that the human experience is not central to the universe. Our observations of the universe lead us to believe that the human experience is just a random phenomena in the corner of some galaxy and that is the best available information we have. To discuss anything outside of what we know is like trying to ask someone who is born blind to describe color.

DNA and quantum mechanics are 2 areas where the boundary between philosophy and science has shifted over time. All the modern talk about multiverses, universe simulations, and AGI seem philosophical, but might become scientific in the future. But people who believe in these concepts will take different actions than people who don’t, so you can’t say it just doesn’t matter because we can’t prove it yet.

I wasn’t trying to lump math and science together and agree they’re very different, although both based on core propositional truths that are taken on faith.

> All the modern talk about multiverses, universe simulations, and AGI

None of the things you mention are "philosophical truths". The first is one of many interpretations of QM, the second is a meme, the third is a vague, unclear teleological goal of computer science. I'm not objecting to the fact that you can speculate, I myself said that pointing to new things, as vague and undefined they may be, is generally useful and stimulating. I'm objecting to the idea that you can have "truths you can't prove".

> I wasn’t trying to lump math and science together and agree they’re very different, although both based on core propositional truths that are taken on faith.

Sorry, my fault. Tomato, tomato.

I do not see in what respect this might be a category error. The „box“ all these things are put into is the box of things we can ask questions of the form „What do we mean when we talk about X?“ about. This is possible for religion, science, aesthetics and logic likewise. And that’s what philosophers are doing.

In that sense your own post is engaging in the very philosophy you deem obsolete. Not only do you reflect on what we actually refer to when we talk about philosophy – thus engaging in metaphilosophy – your entire last paragraph is full of metaphysical and epistemological theses about the world and our knowledge of it. This is the problem of most critics who want to reject philosophy as a whole. They cannot argue for their thesis without already starting to philosophize themselves.