h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>"I think philosophy belongs in *every* classroom; in *every* subject. I have always taken philosophy to cover all non-trivial thought/thinking, thus it contains science, religion (theology) and all other schools of thought and learning."

If philosophy covers all learning, then isn't it being taught by definition?
In practice, an overgeneral definition of any term, especially if it's not one that is widely shared, would seem to be essentially pretty useless or worse.

Academic philosophy (alongside navel-gazing pontifications on the meaning of meaning and the reality of reality) may formalise widely-used methods of reasoning, but that doesn't give it ownership of those methods, even if it gives it the labels to use when talking about those methods of reasoning at a meta-level.

I remember being taught philosphy and could only think that the philosophy of science seemed increadibly out of date.

The problem here is that most philosophers lack the sort of knowledge of science that is needed to do good "philosophy of science". And most scientists don't have the time to take a step backwards and analyse what they actually do, and some of the underpinning assumptions that they make. Which is a shame, because it can be a very thought provoking area.

Noggin

It would seem that *a few* people (not necessarily anyone here, but certainly some people I have met IRL) who have studied philosophy start to think they have necessarily learned some skills that make understanding other areas easy, or that other people couldn't have developed those skills any other way

Classification-wise, it's possible to consider philosophy includes all of science ("Science is just 'natural philosophy'"), and that might be true in a narrow sense, yet there is the risk of taking the idea too far.
In the same way, a physicist who understood the behaviour of fundamental particles could consider chemsitry a subset of physics ("It's just looking at the behaviour of atoms and ions interacting by means of exchanging or sharing electrons"), and that would be true in the narrow sense that they have insight into a certain level of abstraction and analysis (in this case, a lower one).
However, that doesn't mean that a physicist necessarily understands much chemistry, or even that they might find it significantly easier to study than a non-physicist would.
It may even be that the physicist's level of abstraction could be a hindrance at some times, as well as a help at others - chemists may indeed have developed near-optimal ways of understanding chemistry at its own levels of abstraction, and even if some abstractions may not really be true in a deeper sense, they may still be the most useful in the appropriate setting.

An individual who has studied philosophy may well be much better at analysing logical arguments, scientific reasoning, etc than that same person may have been absent their philosophical education, but that doesn't mean that that person (or other people) couldn't develop similar skills, or possibly even more appropriate ones for a particular field, by studying other things.