Philosophy still teach science a lesson

I like this little selection of correspondance about the relationship between philosophy and science.
Letters: Philosophy can still teach science a lesson | Education | The Guardian:
The most negative comment is this:

 Stephen Hawking was right to insist that philosophy is dead. It should be, for, as another leading scientist Steve Jones opined, "philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex"

And I wasn't quite sure I understood it. It sounds like a plea for fundamentalist positivism. Though I wonder whether the quote within that quote is saying that while science actually does the stuff, philosophy just looks on and drools. That would be positivistic, I think: science done without heed to the bigger questions and to its own limits and assumptions and their implications is prone to produce people who make elementary mistakes. Stephen Hawking really ought to know better: the elementary mistake of not paying attention to what 'nothing' might mean, for example might have avoided a rather embarrassing gaffe ...


So it was good to see one correspondent writing:

given the messes that popular and some other science has made of the subjects of time, the mind, the nature of religious utterance, and consciousness above all, it is ignorant to suppose that that science needs no help.

I think there's a pot-shot at the challenged pronouncements of certain new-atheists, rightly.
I guess I'd not put it as 'needs no help' so much as 'realises that it is inevitably immersed in philosophical issues and should learn to do them well'.