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Scientists live in this simple, stable world filled to the brim with countless, benign little engines — “nomological machines” — by which everything reliably works. In this idealised world, we can predict the period of a swinging pendulum with Galileo’s equation. We can calculate the pressure and volume of a quantity of gas with Boyle’s law. We can explain the accelerating expansion of the universe with dark matter, dark energy and an arbitrary cosmological constant. [I don’t think this last one is a great example — Ed]

In the scientists’s world, everything runs like clockwork.

Philosophers inhabit, more or less, a dark inversion of the scientists’ world. Theirs is, instead, a universe of insoluble conundrums. They also fill their space with ingenious devices, only malicious ones: “thought experiments” invented specifically to bugger everything up.

In the scientist’s world, everything goes to plan. In the philosophers’ world, nothing does.

For every scientific axiom, whirring happily away in its intricate cage, plotting out the reliable progress of the world, the philosophers have their obstreperous demonic contraptions: here, a brain in a vat, there, a Chinese room, over yonder, a parallel universe — designed to throw the whole edifice into confusion.