One of the funnier legacies of the game of telephone in the humanities reporting on the collapse of logical positivism is the "self-defeating, because can't justify itself" move is then used to deflect *all* encroachments by the dread evil STEM.

In particular I've now seen multiple instances where one party makes the standard argument that science *includes* certain subsections of philosophy, and is met by the rejoinder "this is just scientism; which cannot justify itself without philosophy."

Like *why* should a specific subsection of philosophy around logic and naturalism be conjoined with eg those sections of philosophy around aesthetics and history of philosophy? Why can't the proponent smoothly argue for jettisoning the rest? This sort of defensive move seems to be grounded in nothing more than appeal to some arbitrariness of academic "fields" as defined within a very specific present funding and department context.

One could *easily* imagine a situation where "philosophy" departments are located within the science building and have no cultural sense commonality or shared identity and interests with humanities fields.

It seems a weird quirk of history in the 40s/50s reshuffling of everything that made the modern Two Cultures, that philosophy should end up not being seen as a science!