“But I Am Superior”: Does Philosophy Have a Superiority Complex?

Last updated: October 21, 2026

The “But I am superior” meme is a two-panel anime exchange: a girl labelled “The rest of academia” asks a boy labelled “Philosophy”, sitting alone at a long table, “can’t you do something about your superiority complex?”, and he calmly answers, “But I am superior.” It lands because philosophers do sound like that to other departments, and occasionally to each other.

The attitude has a long paper trail. In the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Immanuel Kant mourned that metaphysics, once “the queen of all the sciences” in J. M. D. Meiklejohn’s translation, had become a fashionable target of scorn, forsaken like Hecuba. Two centuries later the physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow opened The Grand Design (2010) by declaring that philosophy is dead because it has not kept up with modern science, as the philosopher Paul Thagard reported. Philosophy may be the only subject that has received both a crown and an obituary.

Plato Wanted Philosophers on the Throne

Philosophy’s claim to rank goes back to its founding texts, and so does the mockery that answers it.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells his listeners that cities will have no rest from their troubles until philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers (Republic V, 473c to d). He calls the idea the greatest of the waves and expects it to drown him in laughter, and Glaucon warns that plenty of people will come at him for it. The ridicule was already traditional. In Plato’s Theaetetus (174a), Socrates tells how a Thracian servant girl laughed at Thales for falling into a well while staring at the stars, eager to know what was in the sky and blind to what lay at his feet. Aristotle then gave philosophy its highest title. He called the study of first causes “first philosophy” (Metaphysics VI.1) and ranked it the most divine of the sciences (I.2), because its objects are divine and a god would possess it most of all, as Aristotle argues in Book I (see also the SEP entry on his metaphysics).

How the Queen Lost Her Throne

“Queen of the sciences” has had several holders, and philosophy has rarely held the title alone.

Medieval universities put theology on top. The arts faculty, where philosophy was taught, prepared students for the higher faculties of theology, law and medicine, and the formula “philosophy is the handmaid of theology”, associated with the eleventh-century theologian Peter Damian, summed up the pecking order. Kant’s queen was metaphysics, the core of philosophy, rather than philosophy as a whole, and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, as his friend Sartorius von Waltershausen reported, handed the crown to mathematics. Kant wrote in 1781, when Newtonian physics had become the model of secure knowledge that metaphysics so obviously lacked. Seventeen years later, in The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), he accepted that philosophy was the “lower” faculty beneath theology, law and medicine, which serve the state, and argued that its low rank was exactly what left it free to answer only to reason, a reversal the Akademie edition text lets you read in the original German.

The Sciences Moved Out of the House

For centuries physics went by the name natural philosophy, and the sciences largely became separate professions, with their own journals and societies, during the nineteenth century.

Isaac Newton’s masterpiece of 1687 is called Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the mathematical principles of natural philosophy. The word “scientist” is younger than the steam locomotive. William Whewell, the Cambridge polymath, proposed it at the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, after Samuel Taylor Coleridge objected to calling experimenters “philosophers”, as the historian Laura Snyder recounts. It first appeared in print in Whewell’s anonymous 1834 review of Mary Somerville, which admitted the word was “not generally palatable”. Psychology left later in the century, usually dated to Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig in 1879, which Britannica treats as the first psychological laboratory, and logic partly moved to mathematics and computer science in the twentieth.

Seen from inside philosophy, this can look like a family of brilliant children moving out and not calling. Seen from outside, philosophy was left holding the questions nobody could test, which is either a noble burden or a polite description of unemployment. Philosophers can claim to be the parent of every science, and scientists can reply that the parent no longer pays the rent.

The Physicists Strike Back

Several prominent attacks on philosophy’s standing have come from physicists, and the replies have been almost as pointed.

Hawking and Mlodinow’s verdict drew quick replies from philosophers, Paul Thagard among them, who pointed out that the same book went on to make contentious philosophical claims, for instance about models creating reality. In 2014 the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson told the Nerdist podcast that questioning everything can stall you and asked philosophers why they were wasting their time, as Daily Nous reported. The reply came from Massimo Pigliucci, who holds doctorates in evolutionary biology and philosophy, in an essay on the value of philosophy, which made the “philosophers versus scientists” framing hard to sustain. A line often attributed to Richard Feynman, that philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds, is a better joke than it is a quote: Quote Investigator found no solid evidence Feynman said it, and the earliest close version comes from Steven Weinberg in 1987, who credited an unnamed source.

Meanwhile some of the questions philosophy kept have turned practical. Modern bioethics runs on principles that philosophers helped formulate, such as respect for persons, beneficence and justice in the Belmont Report (1979), which still underpins US rules for research on human subjects, and debates about AI and evidence keep sending engineers back to concepts philosophers have argued over for centuries.

Where the Word “Complex” Comes From

“Superiority complex” is a term from psychology, and its origin suggests why the meme lands. The Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler built his psychology around the “inferiority feeling”, and in The Science of Living (1929) he gave chapters to both the inferiority and the superiority complex, treating the second as compensation for the first.

On Adler’s account, as summarised by Britannica, feelings of inferiority can push people to overcompensate, turning an ordinary striving for superiority into an egocentric striving for power and self-aggrandizing behaviour at others’ expense; Britannica also notes that “inferiority complex” was later often used for what Adler called the inferiority feeling. The table of contents of The Science of Living shows Adler using both “complex” terms himself. Applied to philosophy, that is a strangely good fit for the meme. A discipline that has been told for centuries that it is useless, dead or merely decorative might well answer with a calm “But I am superior.”

None of this settles the question. A complex is a defence, and defences can protect something real. Philosophy has given the world formal logic (from Aristotle to Frege), much of the early theory of scientific method (Bacon, Whewell, Mill), natural-rights theory (Locke) and the principles of modern bioethics. It has also given the world a lot of impenetrable prose, which we take on in our post on why philosophy uses complex language, and its best defence remains the one Socrates practised, asking questions rather than issuing verdicts, as our post on the Socratic method describes.

For the meme that says every philosopher is just copying the last one, read the philosopher meme explained.