To the extent that all people are considered philosophers, the claim that person X is a philosopher is meaningless, and therefore is a statement that is not worth making. Just as I do not constantly go around identifying myself with, "human, primate, born on planet Earth, circling the star Sol, in the Milky Way galaxy..." Those statements are true but provide no useful information to anyone distinguishing me from anyone else.
To the extent that "philosopher" is identified with the practice of philosophy as discussed and practiced in philosophy departments, it is a meaningful identifier. But also *SHOULD NOT* be applied to most scientists. For similar reasons, the historical theological roots of early scientists does not make modern fields like chemistry into branches of theology.
As for science distancing itself from its earlier foundations, there is nothing ironic about it. In fact that act is essential to how science as a field operates. The purpose of a scientific education is to indoctrinate the student with the norms, values and knowledge of current scientific paradigms that will allow the student to operate within, extend, challenge, and hopefully improve those paradigms. Exposing the student to the details of outdated approaches only to explain why they became outdated is an activity of limited use, and therefore we strictly limit how many such examples students must learn. And even for those we do not explain previous ideas in detail. What purpose is there in explaining to students who must learn inertia, Aristotle's ideas that all things naturally come to rest? Why would we bother explaining the history of attempts to find mechanisms for and explanations of Noah's Flood to students who are about to learn about the Ice Ages and that Noah's Flood didn't happen?
The first clear description that I know of for this process comes from Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. At the time he was a physicist who had developed an interest in the history of science. He implicitly assumed a shared context with the reader. People who have mastered a hard science generally have that context. I have that context, and found the book delightful.
Unfortunately after writing that book, he spent a lot of time responding to creative misunderstandings of his work from philosophers who lacked that context. I found little value in those criticisms, or in his responses. Yet another example of how I've found a lack of value in philosophy as practiced by philosophers.