Plagiarism, flattery, and the internet

Earlier this month (August 2010), Stanley Fish addressed the question of what it is to plagiarize & what’s wrong with plagiarizing in his Opinionator blog. Fish understands plagiarism to be using “words that were first uttered or written by another without due attribution”; and he understands that act to offend against the code of behavior that belongs to a particular guild. The guild in question is the academic one, where attribution is expected. There’s no moral question about the offense, any more than there is about breaking the rules of golf while you’re playing. Neither the rules of golf nor those of the academic guild have moral weight; they simply describe what you need to do if you want to perform that activity.

This is all abundantly & elegantly correct, in the usual Fishian deflationary mode. It should be borne in mind by Catholic thinkers, who have a tendency to get morally over-excited about this topic. It should also encourage us (we Catholics, that is) to ask whether the nature of the intellectual work we are called to do, in the methods & goals of which we should train our students, requires us to forbid & penalize plagiarism, defined as Fish does, with the same degree of enthuiasm as does the academic guild. It seems to me that we should not: a properly nuanced understanding of tradition, & of our capacities for thought, speech, & writing as gift, leaves little room for the categorization of plagiarism as an offense. It should & could be one of the distinctives of the Catholic intellectual life that we are altogether less exercised about plagiarism than our pagan counterparts.

There is a nice & deeply Catholic point here. Fish is not a Christian, even though he knows more theology than most Catholics, and understands it better. His clarity about what plagiarism is & what’s wrong with it (& especially about what’s not wrong with it) helps us Catholics to see with greater clarity than we likely otherwise would the lineaments of our own intellectual practice. As always, the Church needs the intellectual work & witness of those outside herself as stimulus to provoke and lead her to a fuller understanding of what she is and does.

(this post was plagiarized from paul j. griffiths) (I just couldn't do it straight, so I created a logical conundrum instead!)

The Onion

http://www.theonion.com/articles/deranged-gunman-opens-fire-on-shooting-range,17468/

On Burying our Nuclear Waste in the West

"It has happened over and over again that promised land or holy land by one reckoning is wasteland by another, and we assert the sovereign privilege of destroying what we would go to any lengths to defend." Marilynne Robinson, "Wilderness"

Critique of Utilitarianism

"Let Benthamism reign, if men have no aspirations…" John Henry Newman, A Grammar of Assent, p. 88.

Lives of Significance

"Significance can, of course, be a misleading description of the lives that got my attention. Significance suggests importance. It suggests lives that make a difference and that demand acknowledgment. But the lives of significance that I began to notice were not significant in any of those ways. Rather, they were lives of quiet serenity, capable of attending with love to the everyday without the need to be recognized as "making a difference." Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child

A Different Kind of Logic Course

I'll be teaching Logic next semester. I've taught the standard courses before. They are often more like math classes than philosophy classes. I want to teach not just mathematical logic, but the philosophy of logic, from Parmenides to the present. Topics: Mythos and Logos; Greek philosophy through Aristotle; Stoicism?; Descartes and Leibniz; Kant and Hegel; Frege, Husserl, Russell, and Dewey; propositional logic; Boole, Cantor, Godel. Any suggestions?

Tangled lines

Over the last several years, I have operatively adopted an historicist account of human nature (ala Hegel, Gadamer, Sartre, Ortega). For many (Sartre and Ortega included, I think) that account is opposed to view of natural law in which the goals and basic structures of human nature are given not by human decisions or by human history but by something more grand in which humans participate. I think Hegel and Gadamer would have a more nuanced position here than Sartre or Ortega allow – that is, while remaining basically historicist, they can incorporate an account of “nature” into that account rather than leaving it as a contradictory opposite.

So, now I’m rethinking my thoughts from the standpoint of primitivism, which completely reconfigures the relation between nature and history On the primitivist account, human nature is a product of millions of years of evolution (so evolution provides a broadly historicist framework, but not in the sense of history used by the thinkers above). “History” (in the narrow sense of the word used by historicists) began only about 10,000 BC, and that is not enough time for any real biological change in humans. So we are all basically what we were in the Paleolithic age; our bodies, our minds -- our nature – is best suited to the environment and life “we” had then. So, the primitivist essentially makes a natural law case for human ethics.

Questions: In what senses is the primitivist case different from a natural law account of human nature? What are the advantages of an historicist account of human nature that we would lose and need to rethink if the primitivist case seems convincing? Has anyone written a critical review comparing the theoretical frameworks of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals with the more historicist framework assumed in most of his other writings?