Abstract Does philosophy make scientific progress, and if yes, how much? As Dellsén, Firing, and Norton have recently argued, to answer this, we need to consider both empirical questions about the history of philosophy and theoretical questions about the definition of scientific progress. In this paper, I develop a case study about the origin of analytic philosophy—focusing on Frege—to show that in this period we can document what I call a clear case for scientific progress in philosophy. That is, philosophy made scientific progress over this period no matter what definitions of scientific progress we consider, even by the very high standards of scientific progress that pessimists about progress in philosophy endorse. Thus, if any of the existing accounts of progress are correct, philosophy made progress at the origin of analytic philosophy.
Daniele Bruno Garancini (Thu,) studied this question.