"the differences between philosophy, biology, physics, the social sciences and so on might not be the result of the arbitrary caprice of academic administrators and faculty..."

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/massimo-pigliucci-on-consilience/

Who knows what

For decades the sciences and the humanities have fought for knowledge supremacy. Both sides are wrong-headed

Massimo Pigliucci 08 October 2012

"The notion of ontological reductionism is widely accepted in physics and in certain philosophical quarters, though there really isn’t any compelling evidence one way or the other. Truth be told, we don’t know whether the laws that control the behaviour of quarks scale up to the level of societies and galaxies, or whether large complex systems exhibit novel behaviour that can’t be reduced to lower ontological levels. I am, therefore, agnostic about ontological reductionism. Fortunately for the purposes of this discussion, it doesn’t matter one way or the other. The real game lies in the other direction.
.....................

Seen this way, the differences between philosophy, biology, physics, the social sciences and so on might not be the result of the arbitrary caprice of academic administrators and faculty; they might instead reflect a natural way in which human beings understand the world and their role in it. There might be better ways to organise our knowledge in some absolute sense, but perhaps what we have come up with is something that works well for us, as biological-cultural beings with a certain history."