Philosophy is a skill, a method.
A joke.
As a philosopher, I need to take on XKCD and all of its wrongness.
First, widely-believed theories are not only overturned on occasion by simple thought experiments, they are overturned every day by simple hacking of e-mail accounts: Global warming is a myth; someone wrote an e-mail about it. Look it up. Polar bears don’t even like snow.
Second, my philosophy degree does not equip me to ask interesting questions, it equips me to drive taxis and annoy internet trolls. I’ve never asked an interesting question.
Third, as a philosopher, I would never wait as long as an hour to overturn a theory I had just learned. That smacks of modesty, which is for the ordinary folks: I call them Small-Brains. They work at MIT.
Fourth, the “Racecar on a Train” idea not only overturns Special Relativity, but also Gravity. And “Twin Earth” overturns Evolution. Suck it, Twin-Darwin.
Face it, Science: You were Philosophy’s bastard child and you thought you could inherit the Kingdom, but the Philosopher King knows what’s best and he’s sending you to bed without supper for your own good.
Because he said so.