Way back in 2014 popular astrophysicist and Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson did a Nerdist Podcast in which he seemed critical and dismissive of philosophy. There was a response from the defenders of philosophy and some critics went so far as to accuse him of being a philistine. While philosophy’s most ancient enemy is poetry (according to Plato), science is usually up for a good fight.
Tyson presents a not unreasonable view of contemporary philosophy, namely that “asking deep questions” can cause a “pointless delay in your progress” in engaging “this whole big world of unknowns out there.” To avoid such pointless delays, Tyson advised scientists to respond to such questioners by saying, “I’m moving on, I’m leaving you behind, and you can’t even cross the street because you’re distracted by deep questions you’ve asked of yourself. I don’t have time for that.”
While I wrote about this back in 2014, it is wise to revisit my views on the matter.
The idea that a scientist might see philosophy as useless (or worse) is consistent with my own experiences in academics. Since 2014, STEM has risen and the humanities have been under constant attack. As one example, as of Fall 2026 Florida A&M University will no longer have a distinct philosophy (and religion) major. I will still be teaching philosophy, but in a new combined program made up of philosophy, history, religion, and African-American studies. We are, of course, lucky that we are still permitted to even exist. To be fair and balanced, a case can be made against philosophy. And the concern that the deep questioning of philosophy can cause pointless delays has merit and is well worth considering. After all, if philosophy is useless or even detrimental, then this would be worth knowing.
The main bite of this criticism is that philosophical questioning is detrimental to progress: a scientist who gets caught in these deep questions, it seems, would be like a kayaker caught in a strong eddy: they would be spinning around rather than zipping down the river. This concern also has practical merit. To use an analogy outside of science, consider a committee meeting aimed at determining the curriculum for state schools. This committee has an objective to achieve and asking questions is a reasonable way to begin. But imagine that people start raising deep questions about the meaning of terms such as “humanities” or “science” and become too interested in the semantics. This sidetracking will create a needlessly long meeting and little or no progress. After all, the goal is to determine the curriculum, and deep questions will only slow down progress towards this practical goal. Likewise, if a scientist is endeavoring to sort out the nature of the cosmos, deep questions can be a similar trap: she will be asking ever deeper questions rather than gathering data and doing math to answer her shallower questions.
Philosophy, as Socrates showed with his Socratic method, can endlessly generate deep questions. Questions such as “what is the nature of the universe?”, “what is time?”, “what is space?”, “what is good?”, “what’s for lunch?”, and so on. Also, as Socrates showed, for each answer given, philosophy can generate more questions. It is also often claimed that this shows that philosophy has no answers as every alleged answer can be questioned and only raises more questions. Thus, philosophy seems to be bad for scientists.
A key assumption is that science is different from philosophy in a key way—while it raises questions, proper science focuses on questions that can be answered or, at the very least, it gets down to the business of answering them and (eventually) abandons a question if it turns out to be a distracting deep question. Thus, science provides answers and makes progress. This, obviously enough, ties into another stock attack on philosophy: philosophy makes no progress and is useless.
One obvious reason philosophy is seen as not making progress and as useless is that when enough progress is made on a deep question, it often becomes a matter for science rather than philosophy. For example, ancient Greek philosophers, such as Democritus, speculated about the composition of the universe and its size. These were considered deep philosophical questions. Even Newton considered himself a natural philosopher. He has, of course, been claimed by the scientists (many of whom conveniently overlook the role of God in his theories). These questions are now claimed by physicists, such as Tyson, who now see them as scientific rather than philosophical questions.
Thus, it is unfair to claim that philosophy does not solve problems or make progress. When philosophy makes progress in an area, that area often becomes a science and is no longer considered philosophy. However, progress is impossible without the deep questions and the work done by philosophers before the field was claimed to be a science.
At this point, some might grudgingly concede that philosophy did make some valuable contributions in the past, but philosophy is now an eddy rather than the current of progress.
Philosophy has been here before—back in the days of Socrates the Sophists contended that philosophical speculation was valueless and that people should focus on getting things done—that is, achieving success. Fortunately for contemporary science, philosophy survived and philosophers kept asking those deep questions that seemed so valueless then.
While some might see philosophy as a curious relic of the past, it is worth considering that some of the deep, distracting philosophical questions are well worth pursuing. Much as how Democritus’ deep philosophical questions led to the astrophysics that a fellow named Neil loves so much.
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I am very surprised at Tyson’s dim arguments and blatant ignorance, for he clearly doesn’t understand what philosophy is for and why it’s called METAphysics: because it goes beyond the physical and the empirical. Philosophy cannot empirically demonstrate much or anything, but only ignorant people would say that it’s useless. It’s also a contradiction: one cannot understand what he doesn’t know, and since I presume Tyson knows very little about philosophy (if anything at all), I doubt he’s in a position to judge it fairly.
Besides, if it were truly useless, why philosophy never really died in almost 3000 years? Religion too, as Schopenhauer called it, it’s ‘metaphysics of common people’, but that doesn’t really make it useless. I am not religious but there are certain things useful about it.
One thing philosophy is that science is not, is that it is creative. Science is a mere deduction, a bare observance of facts, if and when they are seen and understood. Certainly philosophy is more imaginative than just merely observing basic facts. One could say it’s almost an art, the art of thought, but it’s also grounded on logic so it’s not just whatever one would like it to be.
And I disagree with the idea that philosophy ‘doesn’t have any answers’, even though it’s often said by philosophers themselves. I believe they say this out of modesty, not because it’s true. Philosophy has in fact taught me the most important things I could learn, about life, death, myself, and the world around me, and I feel pity for people who learned nothing, which are many: after all, what people say is a pretty good indication of how they think, and thus who they are.
I am certainly not a philosopher and still an idiot (for I agree with Schopenhauer: a philosopher doesn’t talk, he writes. A lot. And I don’t.), but what a difference from the idiot I was 30 years ago. I learned something about logic and fallacies, how to counter argue much more effectively in ‘everyday’ situations that involve for example arguments with burocracy. Also, ‘philosophy’ means a LOT of stuff, not just Western philosophy, which already is a vast world, but for example also some Eastern philosophy (I find very interesting some writings by samurais or buddhist monks).
Tyson seems a bit of an oaf with his ridiculous claims of philosophy ‘being useless’ (he cannot speak for me, you, and hundreds of people who learned something both living and dead who belong to entire ages), or ‘not having answers’ (it has, and I have even observe them in the empirical world, they aren’t just abstractions).
Science is a bit like history: it looks at all the details of this and that. But philosophy observes it all from a bird’s eye view. Several great philosophers said very interesting things about time, space and causality, such as Kant and Schopenhauer, views that seem very daring and surprising, the more so since they took place so long ago.
How is the nature of knowledge, how to live, how we should feel about death, how we think, how we reason, how we speak, etc, useless? That stuff is philosophy, not science.
Sit down, Tyson, or talk about the stuff you understand, namely science, and leave philosophy to the philosophers, for you not only aren’t one, but a pretty poor thinker too. You should blame the stupidity of the masses, of the world, it’s ignorance and the million flaws of the human world, not philosophy, the very thing that tries to make people better than they really are.
Interestingly, Schopenhauer would have dismantled Tyson’s arguments piece by piece. By coincidence I am finally reading the supplements to his main work (not the Parerga and paralipomena and other essays, but the supplements to his main work, which is a lot more technical), and I think he already put Tyson in his place, long ago! I’ll quote some of the many thoughts from his essays in ‘The World as Will and Representation, Vol 2’ translated by E.F.G Payne, which I think is still superior to the more recent translations:
”…..but everything of which one is certain, sure, and hence immediate knowledge, lies within his consciousness. Beyond this consciousness, therefore, there can be no IMMEDIATE certainty (can’t find a way to write cursive); but the first principles of a science must have such a certainty. It is quite appropriate to the empirical standpoint of all the other sciences to assume the objective world as positively and actually existing; it is not appropriate to the standpoint of philosophy, which has to go back to what is primary and original: consciousness alone is immediately given, hence the basis of philosophy is limited to the facts of consciousness; in other words, philosophy is essentially IDEALISTIC.
But REALISM, which commends itself to the crude understanding by appearing to be founded on fact, starts precisely from an arbitrary assumption, and is in consequence an empty castle in the air, since it skips or denies the first fact of all, namely that all that we know lies within consciousness….”.
”…true idealisms, on the other hand, is not the empirical, but the transcendental. It leaves the empirical reality of the world untouched (so he’s NOT saying that the empirical world is BS!) but adheres to the fact that all object, and hence the empirically real in general, is conditioned by the SUBJECT in a twofold manner (and this he explained decades earlier, when he was only 25, for which he received his doctorate in philosophy).
I can’t say I am an ‘idealist’, for after all I also agree with Bertrand Russell when he said: ‘Yes. The grass really is green.’. But again, Schopenhauer did not dispute these facts, he only felt a need that this wasn’t enough and someone (philosophers) had to go beyond facts, i.e. ‘transcend’ them.
Elsewhere he actually derides realism. He asks, you are so sure about this and that, but you aren’t really questioning the source of these ‘facts’, i.e. your MIND….
Take that, Tyson the scientist (not the boxer….)
I don’t say I agree with every single thing Schopenhauer claimed. But, I am sure I have no good arguments against anything I don’t agree with, which is quite little anyways….
by the way, I don’t remember which scientific experiment (I think a quantum physics or mechanics one, I can’t remember) seemed to ‘work’ only – when it was being observed -.
Take sound or music, they don’t exist objectively. Schopenhauer himself said: ‘If a tree falls in the woods, and there’s no one to hear it, does the tree makes a sound?’. And the answer is no. All that happens is a movement of the air. The ‘noise’ happens in our mind.
Same with colours, and in fact, with the whole world!
Now I still struggle to accept the last part, or even ask myself if that makes much sense (why should I care if colours don’t exist ‘objectively’? They are real enough for me.). And yet….
”but realism……is in consequence an empty castle in the air”. And I think it’s easy to misunderstand him here, but he was NOT disputing the ‘facts’ of realism; he was essentially saying: ‘you never ever question your MIND how it arrives at your conclusions about these facts, do you, and whether or not your mind is fooling you in ways you can’t see or understand, for essentially this is exactly the blind spot that prevents you to question how right or wrong it is.’.
And so, Mr Tyson, I think science is the ‘janitor’ of the mind. It gets stuff done, whatever it can do. Great. But philosophy is found at the level ABOVE the mind, since it questions its very existence, authority, and essence.
So, you compared apples with rocks, or something….