It depends on what your criteria for ‘truth’ are, which I think is exactly what we’ve been debating here. What degree of uncertainty are you comfortable with? To call a statement ‘true’ does it have to be testable? Repeatable? Is a strong argument good enough?

I think a great deal of philosophy tends to allow for more leeway here than standard scientific practice, and you seem to have stricter criteria than the average philosopher. Personally I think propositions arrived at via the scientific method are probably the ideal form for truth but that for certain questions this isn’t always a possible method of investigation—or not possible at this moment in history. To me, that doesn’t make the ‘speculative’ answers any less interesting or valuable, at least as possibilities, but yeah they could be wrong

Sure there are philosophical sub fields—probably most notably analytic philosophies of cognition and perception—that are amenable to science, and often the philosophers working in these fields are in dialogue with scientists. But this is pretty far from being representative of the field as a whole.

As far as I’m concerned physicists are as welcome to the party as anyone else but you’re just not going to be settling via the scientific method whether Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment or Schopenhauer’s account of willing are accurate takes on the world anytime soon.

What you’re dismissing as ‘speculation’ is just part of the character of philosophy as a discipline

Philosophy is not a hard science. Actually, you could probably argue that lack of strict, reliable verifiability is exactly where philosophy begins and the sciences end. Not every question can be settled with airtight logic or an experiment; sometimes all you have is a better or worse argument

I think you could say it emerged historically with capitalism but wouldn’t necessarily disappear with the disappearance of capitalism.