How new theories grow from the old

The beautiful thing about philosophy is that philosophies die. New philosophy can then grow from the soil enriched by the dead. (Bas van Fraassen, 2004)

I think that much of what looks like radical rethinking of a theory arises from mistaken apprehension of the theory displaced by the new insights. For example, it seems that Einstein did not see gravity and acceleration as different, even though Newton’s physics tacitly assumed they were.