Philosophy has an image problem. Philosophers are thought to be mystics, religious figures, bullshit artists—anything divorced from reality... Why is philosophy held in such contempt by many physicists? ... one part of the answer probably lies in the split between the two major branches of modern Western philosophy, Analytic and Continental philosophy. Continental philosophers tend to be much more suspicious of scientific claims about knowledge and truth than are their analytic colleagues. Yet the distinction between the two kinds of philosophy is not apparent from a distance—most scientists have never heard of the analytic-Continental divide. So, given that most of the highly visible philosophers in the public sphere today are Continental, and given the attitude that some (not all) Continental philosophers have toward science, it’s not terribly surprising that scientists often have disdain for all philosophers, and sometimes even think that they can do philosophy better than the philosophers can.