I found the best way to solve the philosophical question of truth is empirically. Connecting philosophy with science unites knowledge with wisdom and the truth or light at the end of the tunnel is simply and most beautifully just One.
If you are still searching for truth, study nature, the answer is right here. =

The child looks on, appalled, as its parents fight to the point of estrangement. But perhaps, between religion and science, philosophy is more like the parent watching, appalled, as its children fight to the death. World War I was fought as the last gasp of the old regime in which civil and religious authority were inextricably combined and fed off each other. The next war established the new feudal paradigm between science and state as the rationalization of social norms under a capital economy. That is, the quantifier became our god. But the formal structures of mind still can only construct the means of justifying inference, and not truth, and even that only by taking as axiomatic what is most urgently in need of questioning. Epistemic fact still cannot spontaneously construct intuitions without a similar act of conceit. Time is a virtuous anomaly that cannot be its own articulation. It is an act of departure or change that offers its response freedom in some small sense from the conceit that would call it one. That freedom articulates the worth or virtue of that opportunity that act of departure is. That is, there is nothing unilateral that time is. And neither god nor the quantifier science must take as axiomatic can be so lost the one that unprecedented meaning overwhelms the laws of necessity. It takes a living mind to find the worth and meaning in such loss.
In the thread about Leibniz he was characterized, by Voltaire, as Dr. Pangloss, but science has replaced him with Mr. Gradgrind. There are things in this world that are not imagined in Hawking's speculations. There is a limit to how finely we can slice time into a calculus of probabilities, alternative universes protects the binary structure of logic with a dubious epistemics. The mind is not a text. It is, perhaps, more like a palimpsest in which we cannot read what is written without sacrificing the process of overwriting it is, and cannot access that process without sacrificing what is written there. But if we are satisfied with this ignorance and pass over it in silence we are betraying philosophy, not completing its mission, as so many seem to believe.   

Hawking is not the only scientist to have undermined his otherwise strong claim to being a very smart person by disparaging fields of endeavor other than science.  (Another example is eminent evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson, referring to the publication of Darwin?s Origin of Species: ?All attempts to answer that question [?What is man??] before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.? )  The main theme of Hawking?s book was that we?re getting closer to explaining everything, including the big bang, without needing to invoke God.  Fine, but for that to imply the death of philosophy, current philosophy would have to be focused on God, which it obviously isn?t.   In fact one active area of modern philosophy is the philosophy of science itself.  That work is needed because deeply-held scientific values such as predictiveness  and simplicity (parsimony) are not completely unproblematic.  It is to the credit of the philosophy community that philosophers are taking seriously those scientific values and attempting to clarify them.  Meanwhile  we scientists go blithely ahead using them, with some like Hawking not only being unaware they need clarifying, but even going so far as to disparage the clarifiers? field.   I like Laura?s very convincing essay, including her description of philosophical endeavor and progress as getting ?clearer about issues as time goes on, even if we don?t come up with final and agreed upon answers.? 
It seems to me that science and philosophy are linked in another way, although I don?t know whether experts in the history or philosophy of science would agree with this concept:  I think science is exactly what we get when we take certain ideas in philosophy seriously.  Are things as they seem to each person, or are some things a certain way no matter what anyone observes, believes, or wishes?   Accepting the latter implies the possibility of investigating those things in a shared enterprise where observations can be repeated by others and explanations are be subjected to public scrutiny and refutation, exactly as is done in science.  But assuming things are a certain way independent of human minds also implies that no state of our mind can guarantee that a given belief is true, so the results of the enterprise must be accepted as tentative.  This is also supposed to be a feature of science, although one that some scientists tend to forget in their enthusiasm for their subject.

Those who insists the core of philosophy is linguistic should appreciate how the perennial recurrence of questions that never seem to get resolved has the rather remarkable effect of expanding our language capabilities regarding that issue. If this is how language comes into being it is not facts or varification that drives our interest in it, but the intuition that talking in a context of an effort to bring intense rigor to a subject that defies answers gives us the power to find answers where they can be found. This is why science will always be the weak sister to philosophy, regardless of its otherwise appearing to be the very paradigm of power. Can the pursuit of wisdom endure amongst us without our loving it?
Actually, the most important effect of Darwin was not his evolution theory, but a simple methodological breakthrough that he himself did not recognize and would probably have opposed if others put it to him. This was the rather astonishing revelation that we need to study life as it is lived if we are to understand how it came to be as it is.

The modern scientific movement comes off as nothing more than an attempt to prescribe preferences, to me. First, I'd like to see any scientist no matter the field try to answer the question of why we need science, without using philosophical thought. The only honest answer, if Hawking were to remain consistent, is to say "Because it appeals to me". Any answer outside of that, like N.D. Tysons' answer "Humans need to know the truth", is philosophical in nature. There is no laboratory that can demonstrate the "need" for truth. Maybe I am biased because I am a Christian and I've always had a love for philosophy, but this movement comes across to me as some sort of obscure challenge for scientists to prove their field of thought trumps theology or philosophy.

Hawking is not the first one to say this. I think Nietzsche does somewhere. Heidegger published a book called The End of Philosophy. "Philosophers", so called (very little that passes for philosophy today deserves the name) have been announcing the end of metaphysics for decades, ontology has become a foreign word, and dialectic is treated as heresy. But if philosophy is dead, this is a case of cold-blooded murder, not natural causes. But the coroner has been bought-off by technocrats or intimidated into silence by the Leo Strauss crowd. The fact is that fundamental issues remain as alive as ever that can only be ignored or deemed either settled or moot as an act of dishonesty or venality.

Truth 101
I think that one day soon, truth will become the most important lesson to learn of anything else, including history, mathematics, physics or science. Truth is the only lesson than will set us free. Philosophy must lead the way. But before philosophy can share the truth it must first find the truth, and for many or most, there is still much work to do. Is philosophy even searching at all?
Einstein said that of all the people he would like most to be associated with, it would be the "true searchers", for which there are only a few living at one time. Philosophy needs our help, (and it is not money Philosophy Talk!)  philosophy simply needs the truth to share.  
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Been reading John Gray? The narrative sounds similar. I agree though, I watched a debate with Sam Harris and Laurence Krauss claiming that science has proven morality. They stated that "Monkeys are charitable to each other, and ostracize the greedy chimps." Great, that hardly demonstrates anything more than a couple monkeys acting on instinct to protect the tribe. Kant would be rolling in his grave with a moral prescription like that, obviously implying that intent means nothing. But wait! Sam Harris later on claimed that morality is directly based on intent, he claimed that "Christians are immoral because they're concerned with an end goal, rather than doing good for its own sake." Which leaves a very huge contradiction, because certainly apes don't have "good will", they have impulsive preferences. At least, if they do it hasn't been demonstrated by science. Not to mention, how do we measure "good for its own sake", everyone acts according to their desires. If charity makes you feel good, you'll be drawn to it, if it doesn't, you wont.

One day soon is not the same one this one is. One, and time, extends only in dissipation. If we ignore this we don't know what we mean by one, any one. And this is truth. It's all too easy to get lost in the one. Until you lose it.
Hawking came after I put physics behind me. It was Feynman in my day, and he was an entirely different animal. He had a genius for making the most difficult concepts manageable, even fun. Hawking's string theory, though I am no longer competent to comment on its mathematical correctness, is, as I do understand it, a system of otherwise incoherent events. At this level of energy (extremely high) and time (extremely small) even the probabilistic calculus of quantum theory does not operate. It is, then, a sequence of random events in theory organized outside mathematical order, by a kind of "charmed attractor". But there is no mathematical value it is because each event incorporating it is a perfect anomaly to all other events, and mathematical (and logical) formulas can only define by extension. Time is divided between extension and moment anomalous to it. This is the mystery science cannot resolve, it can only take some formula of extension as axiomatic of it. Number doesn't penetrate the hermetic seal between extension and moment, it simply denies it. To any mathematical formula anomaly is void. It has no numerical value. Its value is lexical or semantic, and inhabits the realm of morality, not quantity. This does not mean it is immaterial, it means that quantity is immaterial to its value. If anything, it is more what matter is.
John Gray sounds to me like just another Straussian, a blend of Friedrich Hayek and Joseph de Maistre. Nothing notable or new.
 

"John Gray sounds to me like just another Straussian, a blend of Friedrich Hayek and Joseph de Maistre. Nothing notable or new"
I wouldn't quite say he's "notable", but I think he has some relevance in the modern era. He's the only living thinker (with any noteriety) I know of that is defending philosophy and theology against the technocratic humanists in a coherent manner. Though, what IS notable to me, while he used to be just another run-of-the-mill free market economist, he shifted his opinion halfway through is career and though certainly still supports free markets, he doesn't prescribe them invariably to all nations and all peoples. He is one of the very very few economists in history that accepts the fact that cultural preference is more important in determining the function of the economy of a nation rather than some "one size fits all" economic theory. I agree with him whole-heartedly. Personally, I am a free market guy myself and I find it preferable, but I realize that it simply isn't for everyone because we all have different goals. That is what I like most about him.

Great comments, thanks!

Don't get me started on a Sam Harris/Lawrence Krauss rant...

As it turns out, I do have Gray's book on Berlin, but not enough material (or interest) to detect a shift in his thinking.
We suppose that to do philosophy we must be prepared to make rigidly valid inferences, and to do this we must take categories as hermetic and propositions as complete. The result is a habit of "mind". That is, of thinking that reality follows rational principles we can predetermine and plan. It's all part of the conviction (or conceit) that time is extension rather than anomalous moment. The quantifier rules because the only complete meaning is death. And so we conceive time as enduring or as an epoch of duration. Of course we try to plan our lives, but this does not mean there is determinacy in these plans, it only means we cannot navigate time without the conceit that death is not imminent. And so we put all our eggs in that basket. But life does not behave in this way. It does not meekly accept the central planning of the mind and obey or stick to the game-plan. It plays with things, it disobeys and defies the concept. But this process fills out the meaning of the idea, it does not undo it. Sometimes going in reverse is the best way forward. Put wings on a pig and it will do everything but fly until it can see nothing else to do with them. This is why progress can be real without seeming so. But if time is more real and material as the qualifier of extension, rather than the mere counting out of it, then there is a dialectical structure to it in which all the alternatives are explored or exhausted as the material progress of implementing the idea. A case in point is the way villagers in the feudal system carried on a semi-collective, and yet richly private life under the noses of their feudal lords. Amongst themselves they had an intense commitment to the right of their neighbors to influence all community decisions and implemented this as a constant flow of bickering that their masters regarded with scorn derision and complete lack of understanding, as if in a foreign language. But in that language the common folk were able to dispute and undermine the authority of their 'lords' until there was no disputing their influence, and the way was prepared for democracy. This is real, it happened. The murderous lords of feudal Europe were simply talked into democracy, but in a way they hardly knew was happening. The dialectic is real, but it does not follow causal laws or the rigid patterns of mind we have grown to believe implicitly. Hegel had it right, but you have to realize that he would have been thrown in jail if his superiors knew what he was at, and so he put his thesis in terms flattering to them, but clear enough to a more penetrating reader. nothing real should be taken on face value. For then it gets quantified and voided of its real value, or its value as real. I'd suggest Feyerabend's The Conquest of Abundance.  And then ask yourself, what is this abundance is.

'Western Science' assumes a truth, or assumes that 'knowledge' (apart from memory) exists. This might be the biggest problem of both western science and philosophy (dualism). Western Science improved skill, but together with philosophy was at standstill since Enlightenment.
Have a look at:  http://paradigm-shift-21st-century.nl/western-scientific-paradigm.html

Revisiting this discussion prompted this thought: Gould's idea of NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria) and the related ideas of several contributors above that some questions cannot (ever) be addressed by science has a deep flaw. We need only think of the consequences of the abrupt steps in knowledge that the telescope and the microscope brought. Consider the new knowledge from the microscope. Prior to van Leeuwenhoek and the others, no religious or philosophical traditions had *anything* to say - or think - about the microworld both within us and beyond us. The transformation of understanding of microbial-driven disease alone has had profound consequences for our understanding of ourselves and key features of the human condition. Similarly, consider the telescope's revelations about the nature of Earth's location and 'status' in the Cosmos. In contrast to the utter ignorance of the microworld that microscopy dispelled, philosophy (and especially religion) had indeed long nurtured an Earth-Human-centric ‘universal’ view that was abruptly overturned (Popes notwithstanding). And the insights of evolutionary biology and all that has followed have placed humankind in a very different context from that previously sustained by philosophical (and religious) considerations alone for millennia.

In each case, it can be argued that science didn't set out to overturn long-lived and often cherished beliefs and philosophical traditions. In all this, the overlap of the 'Magisteria' simply emerged unbidden - and often entirely unexpectedly - out of the routine work of science. In the end, the exclusively philosophical realm was forced to retreat.
More recently, the consequences of our cellular structure and function (originating exclusively from microscopy) and the interplay between the inheritance mechanisms (critically including, but not exclusive to, DNA) and our intergenerational cellular continuity as living things have necessarily impinged on profound philosophical consideration. The 'hard question' for philosophy (as labelled by David Chalmers) of consciousness will undoubtedly be circumscribed by neuroscience and cognate disciplines, albeit that philosophers might help shape a more general ‘appreciation’ of the scientific insight.
In all these very fundamental areas the 'Magisterium' on one side had to yield ground as the other demonstrated its greater competence to address the question, indeed often to frame the very question *for the first time*. Presently, philosophy still wrestles with matters that are 'old-hat' science such as Relativity, Quantum mechanics and the rest. To realise (from Relativity) that there is no universal 'now' turns over a fundamental tenet of Immanuel Kant - his 'intuition of space and time' from which he derived his justification for 'absolute certainty'. Philosophers largely still fail to take such matters on board and alter their thinking accordingly. (Chalmers recent survey of academic philosophers reveals how – quite unlike ion Science – there is very little concordance or consensus over a wide range of 'world views' across the discipline). At root, Philosophy lacks the key tool that Science ruthlessly deploys - Popper's falsifiability test. Unless philosophical ideas can be refuted, they will persist ... and so they do. In the end, science repeatedly butts up against the objectivity of having to describe Nature, reality, the objective world of which we are entirely a part, *reliably*; philosophy never *has* to - even if parts of the discipline can often do so ... in the end.
So Science is indeed replacing Philosophy and has done in many domains of human culture. Several contributors here seem not to have noticed. Rather like the old characterisation of religious belief or 'god' as occupying the gaps in our understanding, philosophy as it is widely conducted runs the same risk. But there are often yawning gaps that Science is first to reveal: these gaps remain previously unknown and unoccupied – another shortcoming of philosophy. At root philosophy lacks the robust mechanism for settling its disagreements that Science possesses. But it retains, just like religious belief, a real hold on our thinking and our acting in the world: in that it has a reality but not one derived from a foundation that is either reliable or permanent.