Philosophy is much changed from the time that many of the analytic classics were produced. It now resembles, in many ways, a mature scientific discipline—with large division of cognitive labour. Big philosophical questions are routinely broken down into ever-smaller research questions and addressed in growing thousands of narrow publication units. Yet what purpose does this division of labour serve? Philosophers are notoriously sceptical about simply relying on each other’s published findings. Indeed, most publications seem to add to, rather than reduce, philosophical disagreement. There is a looming worry about absurdity here. Large amounts of intellectual effort are spent on activities that seemingly do not contribute to settling the core questions of the field. In response to this worry, some are tempted by radical claims about the point of philosophy. For instance, some say that it is an ‘exceptional’ field that does not aim to settle on knowledge or truth in the same way as other fields of inquiry. But this response, it seems to me, still leaves the structure of contemporary philosophy without justification. In this talk, I grapple with this problem and explore a more optimistic perspective. I consider a middle ground between two typical ways to think about philosophical progress: locating progress not in the mind of the individual, nor in the discipline as a whole, but rather in the small research communities that populate it.