Richard McKeon's anekdote over Spinoza-plagiaat
Een anekdote die Richard
McKeon over wie het vorige blog ging, vertelde aan zijn student die later een boek
over hem schreef, vond ik te aardig om hem aan het eind van het vorige blog weg
te stoppen. Daarom breng ik hem in een apart blog. De anekdote is te vinden in
George Kimball Plochmann, Richard McKeon: A Study. University Of Chicago Press, 1990
Blurb: In the contemporary atmosphere of concern with the problems of relativism, cultural pluralism, and textuality, the time is ripe for rediscovery of the thought of Richard McKeon, one of the most important but neglected American philosophers of this century. This study by George Kimball Plochmann, a former student of McKeon's, is the first book-length treatment of the ideas of this legendary teacher, scholar, and diplomat who outlined a profound and creative vision for the reorganization of all knowledge and discourse. [Amazon]
In “I Reminiscences of the Years 1932-49”, p. 3-4 is te lezen:
“During a visit to his office that spring, McKeon told me that a student of his in another course had turned in a term paper plagiarized from Joseph Ratner's study of Spinoza, with minor verbal changes made here and there: "This was an odd point of view" was altered to ". . . an exotic point of view," and more of the sort. If, said McKeon, this fellow had done a paper about someone the literature on whom was less familiar to me, I would probably not have spotted the deception. But I had written my doctoral dissertation on Spinoza, and this was the student's fatal choice. So I helped him by taking down the Ratner book and changing back his alterations to the original wordings, and putting in quotation marks and page references as well. I gave the paper an F-plus, and when I handed it back I told the student that the plus was not for him but against myself, because there were two paragraphs that I could not account for—he had either written them himself or copied from some other source that I did not know. And then he told me that he had never even heard of Joseph Ratner, so I said to him that in that case one of your fraternity brothers has played you a dirty trick.”
