[Serious] Generally speaking, is philosophy a worthwhile subject of study?

[The Grand Nudger]

That can get interesting.  Certain ideas about what philosophy is and isn't would exclude a bunch of eastern philosophy... on account of how there's no application of an identical formal system between them.  Philosophy is not, whatever zhuang zhou was doing with his butterfly dream, for example.

Not that I agree with that statement - but it's something people have given some thought to.

And I think that the term 'philosophy' should exclude physics, chemistry, mathematics, geology, and other sciences.

But I *would* include much of eastern philosophy.

That's the general consensus of contemporary philosophy, too.  Still, contemporary philosophy has been strongly affected by scientific enterprise and found it to be very useful, and vv.  

And that is why philosophy has a bad rep.

If it limited itself to asking good questions (which it can and often does do), and pointing out assumptions that may be wrong, then it would be doing a fair amount of good.

But as it is, too many philosophers seem to want to create philosophical systems that they claim to be 'true and correct'. At that point, philosophy becomes useless. Answers are things you don't tend to get out of philosophy.

I've been trying to quantify that for a bit.  Too many philosophers?  How many? Which philosophers? What are the good questions? Daniel Dennet, philosopher of mind. Also a cognitive scientist. He in that set? How about Crosby, theologian, metaphysicist, but also a linguist (that was his door into the philosophy he now holds and advocates for - it's a theory of religion - historically, and perhaps for the present). Shelley Kagan, ethicist, professor? Where do these people fall on the split between good and not good questions - between trying to explain or inform or understand, and trying to assert some correct and true™ thing for it's own sake?