Stephen Hawking said that philosophy is dead. That probably hasn't sat well with some philosophers, but he's right – at least in the sense I think he means. To my mind, there are essentially two major branches of philosophy – one deals with logic, critical thinking, and the implications of science for the human experience. I think that type of philosophy is doing just fine, and probably always will. The other kind is the trying to figure shit out kind. The kind that asks questions like, "What is the nature of time?", or "Does the universe require a cause?" That's philosophical metaphysics, and it's dead in the water. Science wins because it works. The underlying principles of scientific inquiry weren't developed overnight; they developed over millennia, through rigorous trial and error. Over time, we began to figure out that certain types of methods produced results that, when others repeated our experiments, could be duplicated. They all