Excellent post today by Massimo Pigliucci over at Rationally Speaking:
So we observe the pathetic attempts to undermine science by practitioners of so-called “science studies,” who usually know very little about the science they criticize; on the other hand, high-caliber scientists of the like of physicist Steven Weinberg and biologist E.O. Wilson dismiss philosophy as “armchair speculation,” when they know little about either how philosophy is done or what its goals are (e.g., Weinberg complains that philosophy hasn’t solved any scientific problem, apparently without understanding the elementary fact that philosophy is not about solving scientific problems – that’s what science is for!).
Weinberg can be surprisingly vacuous, considering he has a Nobel Laureate in physics. His vaunted statement at the close of The First Three Minutes, ‘the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless’, gives you an idea of what just one semester introductory course on Philosophy might have spared him back when he was a freshman in college. (And spared his readers.)
For all I know, he did take a course, and slept through it.