Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn ( both are philosophers, and Kuhn is also a scientist) would disagree with this article. They have challenged this kind of linear evolution of human knowledge model. In your words: -1% of philosophy made obsolete +99% of your thoughts. Plus anthropology and sociology have many common subjects, but some nuance differences, they may merge together but its not like anthropology made sociology obsolete. It cannot. Some people think that they can be combined into a new unified discipline. And nearly all the sociologists thought that religion will become obsolete in modern society, and today we see that they were wrong. It did not go away. Its not how things work.
I am actually a big fan of Popper and he would agree with my premise.
Not at all. All I am talking about are real world applications.
Sociology today is not considered science, hence the term "soft". Popper smashes "sciences" without falsifiability such as astronomy, sociology, psychology. Richard Feynman had the same view. We simply cannot know. They all sound made up. They make no predictions other than the ones they give to themselves. This is not science and hence why they are obsolete. It will become more evident in the future.
nothing ever goes completely away. not even alchemy. I made that pretty clear.
The people who don't consider sociology as a science, do think the same about anthropology. They mostly see as science just physics, biology and chemistry, and related fields. If based on methodology, sociology uses mathematical tools and it could be considered as more close to science than anthropology which basically only uses qualitative methods. Popper's "we cannot know" is a philosophical view, we cannot know anything for real. We cannot be sure about gravity, about energy, light, colors, anything. Even the sciences based on empirical data are not sufficient to claim that they are universal truths. So, basically, Popper smashes modernist view that there is a truth in science. Sociology is falsifiable. Everyday a lot of articles are written about false predictions, false research methods in psychology, sociology. It is just these are more complex than physics, because of the subject that is humans.
Sociology, psychology, economics are not falsifiable because precisely the subjects are unique humans that cannot be measured so generically.
Many experiments done from sociology and psychology render the entire field false. Example, once they tried to replicate an experiment. Everything was exactly the same but the tapestry of the wall. The results were completely different.
This is to demonstrate how fluid the human character is and how hard is to contact experiment. No replication = no science as far as I am concerned.