I think he meant something along the lines of "Few were sufficiently correct that they were remembered for their discovery."

No, I meant that when you learn about e.g. the chemical elements, you don't also learn who discovered each of them. It's accepted knowledge; you're taught it as facts.

In philosophy, most of the exam questions have someone's name in them. E.g. "explain x's concept of y."

I also had problems with the sentence, probably because it doesn't ring especially true. I can name the discoverer of most of what I know about physics, right from the names: Newtonian physics, Bohr's model, the Schrodinger equation, Euclidian geometry, Gaussian curves... E=Mc2...

FWIW, I too got stuck at that sentence like nowhere else in the text; it took me some tries to macro-expand. Maybe your proofreaders got past it without blinking because they are more acquainted with that point?

(Although Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry are not really counterexamples.)

Einsteinium? (yes, I'm away Einstein didn't discover that =P)