Feynman was actually quite sophisticated philosophically eg. “The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth.” I think when there is a purpose to philosophy eg. understanding science, it works better. When there isn't really philosophers tend to in many cases just discuss what other philosophers have said about each other which tends to get a bit circular and pointless.
Indeed. Feynman was extremely good at getting to the heart of the matter with simple and precise language and no pretensions. This is why so many important ideas of a philosophical nature can be found in his works.
But conversely he had little patience with obfuscating the heart of the matter with unnecessary complications, overly complex or vague language, or pretension of any kind. But philosophers do all of those.
If you read Paul Graham's essay, which I linked to, his proposal for how to fix philosophy is to focus on usefulness. For exactly the reason you stated.
I think perhaps there's a subtlety in that quote - "philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds".
Maybe part of the meaning, is that I'm the course of doing what scientists do, philosophy doesn't move their particular ball forward in the way they want so they can and sometimes do ignore it. Not necessarily that they should.
This guy helped create nuclear weapons, and then quoted the bagvad ghita and had a long time to think about it. I can't imagine it didn't occur to him.
Feynman attempted to make his speech simple, clear, and precise. It is almost certainly a mistake to read subtlety into his language.
Besides, he expressed his negative opinions on philosophy and philosophers in many ways, on many occasions. He very clearly was on the side of those saying that philosophers SHOULD be ignored by anyone who wished to learn science.
