> Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten who discovered what they discovered.
This is laughable. Most of our culture was once philosophy, and I sure don't know whose. If you define philosophy as “that which has not escaped the realm of theoretical philosophy”, then sure. But we use practical philosophy every day!
All fields were once "philosophy", that's a naming artifact not an insight. What's being claimed is something like: when "natural philosophy" and "philosophy" diverged into distinct fields, "natural philosophy" got the good stuff.
“Natural philosophy” has contributed basically nothing to the structure of our society. To our ideas of fairness, and ethics, and how to co-operate with untrustworthy strangers. Its impacts, like medicine, have, but that's like saying trees are responsible for how our society works.
So much of this, we just take for granted. Philosophy is either obvious or wrong.
Is there any evidence that the-thing-we-call-philosophy-today has actually contributed positively to those things? I've seen it claimed that professional ethicists act less ethically in their daily lives than the average member of the public, and most ethics training classes seem at best useless.
There is no evidence. The thing we (non-philosophers) call philosophy today is like the thing we call pure mathematics today: it's the philosophy that hasn't been useful, and therefore hasn't been moved into another field like epistemology or philosophy-of-science or probability theory.
This is laughable. Most of our culture was once philosophy, and I sure don't know whose. If you define philosophy as “that which has not escaped the realm of theoretical philosophy”, then sure. But we use practical philosophy every day!