Stephen Hawking has claimed in his new book that "...philosophy is dead...(it) has not kept up with the developments in science, particularly physics". What do philosophers think of this claim?

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Well, I cannot speak for all philosophers. But it seems to me that Hawking has not kept up with the developments in philosophy. Of course, he need not do so ... unless he plans to say something about them, as he apparently did.

There is a tremendous amount of very scientifically informed philosophy of science. People in philosophy departments and people in physics departments both work on the conceptual, logical, and metaphysical foundations of physics (and analogous points could be made about evolutionary biology or economics, for instance). Even a cursory glance at the literature would bear this out.

I apologize if this sounds somewhat defensive. I guess it is. But physicists do tend to deprecate philosophy of science without having taken the trouble to familiarize themselves with it. See, for instance, Steven Weinberg's book "Dreams of a Final Theory" (1992), to which Wesley Salmon replies in "Dreams of a Famous Physicist", an article reprinted in his book "Causality and Explanation".

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