@davidrevoy I think that there's something deeper going on – we don't seem to have a way to celebrate good work without entangling it with the person who did it. Not naming ideas after people might help.

Taxonomists have been making big efforts under way to remove eponyms in order to stop overriding pre-existing knowledge with western modernism. But so far it's more about colonialism and imperialism than about detaching, say, a bird or beetle from a dirty individual.