Oh, I agree with this totally, of course. It's just that as important as it is to establish facts about the nature of the material world and to develope (useful and not destructive) technology, there are lots of areas where science is mostly just a helpful tool or not much of a factor at all. Like for example morality and ethics - science cannot be used to overcome is/ought dichotomy, but it can be useful as a secondary tool in those fields. Art is a very important, crucially important are of human activity and there too science is peripheral. Science establishes facts not meanings.
I think philosophy as a modern academic discipline is doing fine, but it cannot any longer much assist science, for that part its work is largely done, but I don't think it ever was very central to philosophy. Of course this is a science dominated forum and most people are impatiently asking about the utility, the practical concrete use of philosophy. Well, it certainly cannot build unimaginably horrible weapons of mass destruction or create technology that will lead to massive and destructive changes in climate, that's for sure.
And there is lots of natural science that is not particularly useful in any practical sense - if we find a new species of fly that exists on 10 hectares spot on mountain in Outer Mongolia, it will not be of a huge practical benefit to any. It is knowlege for knowlege's sake - I think much of philosophy is understanding for understanding's sake, related to art, but more formal and at its best, it gives majestic views on our wild, breathtaking, rather existentialist human condition and experience of being in this world.
OK. Well, ... you mention a number of other subjects and various ideas where you say science is not important or not very useful, but where philosophy is said to be important & useful. Only problem is that none of those subjects or ideas seem to involve real actual tangible (material) things. Instead they are all composed of ideas and beliefs or very subjective feelings etc.
What any of us may think is ethical or moral (for example) is purely a matter of personal opinion. Of course over the history of mankind we have learned that it's far better for everyone if we set standards, for examples so that laws are enacted by the courts. So certain behaviours might be legally judged to be unethical or immoral etc. But all that is really saying is that we want to stop people acting in ways that unfairly harm other people. It's really nothing to do with formal academic philosophy (or should not be) - things like that are just a matter of collective judgement about what is dangerous or undesirable in society and which want to deter or stop.
You mentioned art (which might include music and poetry and in fact all sorts of things). But if for simplicity we just look at painted art (or any other form of art), that is entirely a subjective judgement as to whether any piece of art is attractive or desirable or not ... the emotional reaction is not a real thing ... it's a personal subjective view which is wide open to change depending many factors, such as the era in which we live, the culture around us, how we wish to portray ourselves to others etc. etc. ...the artwork itself is a real thing, but it does not actually have any intrinsic value that is good or bad or indifferent except when suddenly judged by an entirely subjective personal opinion that is in any case transient and completely open to change.
None of us need a course in philosophy to decide what paintings or what music we might say that we like at any point in our lives (and where at some other time in our lives we might very well change our minds and say we don't like that any more!)
You mentioned weapons of mass destruction and climate change etc. But that is clearly not the fault of science. That's a really old and washed-up argument. You are talking there about individual people, or populations, and governments, and law making etc., which uses or abuses the science to create all sorts of damage. But it's not the fault of science that people in government have bombs and other weapons built ... and it's not a fault of scientific knowledge that governments and all sorts of people cause damage to the environment ... just because science once discovered that energy could be released by igniting petroleum products, and where inventors turned that into use in mechanical engines, and later inventors and financial businessmen used those ideas to make motor cars which we now see as harming the planet because there so many of them … to blame scientific research for any of that is both absurd and/or really disingenuous.
Finally, on your hypothetical fly on a mountain – if you give us a specific example, then I expect we can check to see what the researchers had to say about the value of what they were doing. But there almost always is a practical point to what science does, even if that is not immediately obvious to people outside that particular research group. A similar criticism has always been levelled at sending manned craft to the moon, or sending any craft to Mars or other planets … in those cases millions of people bitterly complained that it was all an obvious waste of money … but afaik, all of that research has in fact produced real significant value in all sorts of ways , so that the public criticism, while understandable, has really proved misguided and rather naïve.
