Philosophy should not simply follow science, Some people want to believe scientific philosophy is the only remaining real philosophy. I believe they are wrong in that opinion. Edmund Husserl wrote a few volumes of Philosophy as Rigorous Science. He wanted his phenomenology to be developed like science as it were, if I recall correctly. Yet science or knowledge is simply knowledge and scientific method tends to be quite specialized. With AI it is easier to synthesize scientific knowledge or data as knowledge that can be materially compiled to form new paradigms, yet like the realm of forms contrasted with the form of sub atomic particle waves and entangled elements of fields, there are many ways to be creative and induct knowledge and belief. Science may formally develop methods echoing Socrates' paradigm of knowledge and true belief elaborated in The Meno, yet the logic of epistemological relations to reality is not a given and obvious certainty.
Regardless if one takes an AJ Ayer sort of approach to empiricism or not, or is refuted by Quine’s ‘Three Dogmas of Empiricism or supports quines belief in physicalism as the fungible fact of being, one still encounters berkeley’s Ideaist challenges, Sartre’ reef of solipsism and the Holographic principle as obvious things that bring a sense of incompleteness to personal cosmological understanding- and cosmology is the general aim of more materialist sorts of people with philosophical tendencies. Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem facts are present in every formal mathematical system at some point. Even a complete cosmology with some kind of super string theory would be incomplete. The problem of infinities, black holes and even time=0 and what went before would ever be an element of chaos lurking in some difficult to locate spot.
Certainly the idea of a Universe with absolute boundaries is untenable, although if one posits time as an element of relations within a field that may have increased since T=0 some billions of years ago, the expansion may be limited to something like 90 billion light years- and of course some want the idea of an infinite Multiverse to account for things- or 256 extra dimensions that leapt from math into reality. I like the idea that God has infinite knowledge and has knowledge of every possible Universe. An omniscient God should already know of every possible Universe within his mind. One of the theological inferences for questions also has chaos and elements of the unknown within; would the infinite universe need to be actualized or just people experience them within or without God’s thought?
Philosophy is a general overview of possibilities I believe, rather than getting involved in the trees solely, philosophers consider the forest as wood and perhaps as pulp as well if it is taken apart with tech machines or natural disasters. It seems that only one percent of mass is a result of fermions and 99% of bosons that are just force carrying particles. And all of those particle waves are simply entanglements of virtual fluctuations of fields. When physicists mention a quantum froth before everything, that is a result of implicit uncertainty. Realistically why should fields be fundamentally rooted to anything when nothing else possible besides God’s thought might exist, and proto fields might be detached from that immediately. If God were an old style tv set the froth might be regarded as rasters with white noise.
P.F. Strawson wrote in 'Individuals' regarding the epistemological inquiry of inward or intensional thought, vs extensional. The idea that thought may be entirely extensional with scientific method was exposed by W.V.O. Quine in 'The Three Dogmas of Empiricism'. Kant too opened the line of reasoning technically in the Critique of Pure Reason. The problem of epistemology of thinkers apparently embedded in a Higgs field where the mass of the Universe is made up 99% by gluons- force carrying particles, is a deep topic for reflection. Because science is itself a translation of the word 'knowledge', it is worth knowing that anyone may have knowledge- some with true knowledge, some with true opinion etc. Philosophy though is a pursuit of wisdom. It is more than science, and has many branches of inquiry from ethics and epistemology to metaphysics, value theory (axiology etc). Some scientific approaches in ethics and axiology have been rather fascist- that is worth keeping in mind.
Quine and Strawson were logicians and analytic philosophers. One learns from them. Quine for example wrote 'Methods of Logic' wherein he instructs how to design a system of logic for oneself. The philosophy of logic is an interesting branch, although Kant's admonition of sapere aude is relevant for anyone interested in learning. Kripke wrote 'Naming and Necessity' wherein he reviews language and names considering them as a neo-realist rather than a nominalist like Quine did. Learning about language and words and meanings, lexicons etc is a part of philosophy. It isn't the name of those people it was the content they produced; the tools they innovated along with their insights. Consider even Bentham, Mill and utilitarianism; great names because their works were greatly innovative. Even today people still consider utilitarianism pro or con as a rational mass ethical system for politics. And Kant's categorical imperative is a simple ethical precept that is valuable still- "Act only according to a rule (maxim) that you can at the same time will to become a universal law". Such items are part of philosophy and better intersocially than personal egoism as a rule.
Philosophy provides a lot of learning tools. Erasmus wrote 'In Praise of Folly'. Plainly though, for me, philosophy provides a way into good thinking. One may consider theological issues- and they are different than philosophy per se, yet there are areas of overlap. And the overlap coincides with cosmology as well. I regard them in a Venn diagram sort of paradigm with some sharing areas of inquiry and others quite separate. People only know what they know in life. I regard philosophy as not being a religious subject. There is a philosophy of religion of course, yet I tend not to enjoy that clinical approach to matters of faith. And consider Hindu and Brahmin history as interesting religious fields rather than philosophical. Faith in Jesus Christ arises from a different avenue than philosophy. For some it may be personal experience, and for others the Bible and its history have informed them.
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