M. V. Dougherty

In this paper, I argue that commentators have missed a significant clue given by Descartes in coming to understand his 'ontological' proof for the existence of God. In both the analytic and synthetic presentations of the proof throughout his writings, Descartes notes that the proof works 'in the same way' as a particular geometrical proof. I explore the significance of such a parallel, and conclude that Descartes could not have intended readers to think that the argument consists of some kind of intuition. I argue that for Descartes the attribute of existence is a 'second-order' attribute that is demonstrated to belong to the idea of God on the basis of 'first-order' attributes. The proof, properly understood, is in fact a demonstration. Having brought to light the geometrical parallels between the ontological and geometrical proofs, we have new evidence to resolve the 'intuition versus demonstration' controversy that has characterized much of the discussion of Descartes's ontological argument.

This chapter provides a conceptualization of the scholarly record. I propose that items that belong indisputably to the scholarly record meet six hallmarks: the Knowledge, Authorship, Publication, Library, Database, and Discipline conditions. Books issued by scholarly presses and articles appearing in established journals have been the traditional formats for presenting research findings, and such items clearly meet these six conditions. Advances in technology, however, have occasioned new modes for recording and disseminating knowledge, and they create challenges to the long-standing conceptualizations of the scholarly record. Online post-publication review venues, open-access initiatives, interactive scholarly websites, online document repositories, and other venues invite a reconsideration of the precise boundary of the published literature. I distinguish between synchronic and diachronic approaches to the scholarly record. Separating these two allows one to isolate the scholarly record as a present system from past versions that have operated under different parameters and also from future versions that are only anticipated.

This chapter examines the responses of editors and publishers who were presented with evidence of suspected plagiarism in a series of 14 articles and book chapters for one author of record. As the publications divide into those in philosophy and those in health communication, a comparison is possible between the manner in which different disciplines respond to evidence of suspected plagiarism. Using news reports as well as publicly issued statements from the home institutions of the author of record and of co-authors as a backdrop, I examine various textual parallels in light of the 12 published retractions, errata, and corrigenda that have been issued in these cases. Attention is given to the variety of text manipulations present in the articles and book chapters that have been subject to corrections by editors and publishers.

This chapter defends a fourfold heuristic for determining when academic plagiarism has occurred. Drawing from contemporary literature on research integrity, I propose that academic plagiarism has been committed when there is: (1) a non-trivial appropriation of words, images, or formulas, (2) with inadequate credit, (3) that generates an appearance of original authorship, (4) in a discrete item belonging to the scholarly record. This approach is sufficiently general to include a wide range of text manipulations, and yet it is sufficiently narrow to express to the particularities of plagiarism in the context of published research findings. In defending this heuristic, I argue that intent is not required for academic plagiarism, and I propose that academic plagiarism should be treated as a strict-liability offense. The presence or absence of a guilty mind or mens rea is irrelevant to the need to correct the scholarly record when publications themselves are deficient. Intent may be an important element to be considered by institutions that have the role of investigating and punishing wrongdoers for scientific misconduct, but intent should be considered immaterial by members of the research community who have the privilege and responsibility of maintaining the reliability of publications for the world of learning. Too often the role of correcting the scholarly record is conflated with the role of investigating and issuing punishments for research misconduct, but the two are quite different. The chapter also considers the topic of duplicate or redundant publication (often called “self-plagiarism”), and it distinguishes academic plagiarism from copyright violation.

This chapter considers ways in which published corrections of the scholarly record are disseminated throughout the research community. Even when editors and publishers issue corrections, these notifications can still be minimized to the point of irrelevance if they are not reflected in the research practices of other members of the scholarly community. In some humanities disciplines, including philosophy, entries for articles in specialized research databases are not updated to reflect when the status of an article has been changed by a publisher through a retraction, erratum, corrigendum, or expression of concern (“The Database Problem”). At times an article is retracted by a publisher, but then the article is reprinted in another venue without acknowledgment of the retracted status of the original publication (“The Anthology Problem”). Some publishers will correct the electronic version that it hosts in one system but will leave other electronic versions unchanged (“The Platform Problem”). Quite frequently the original uncorrected versions of articles are uploaded on secondary websites outside the control of a publisher. These copies are more accessible to researchers than the corrected versions on the proprietary platforms of publishers, and so researchers download and use the more easily accessible but uncorrected versions (“The Repository Problem”). Furthermore, the authors of record and their institutions at times keep quiet about the changes in status of articles and reference uncorrected versions (“The Pretend-It-Didn’t-Happen-Problem”). I propose clear solutions to these problems and note some positive developments.

Individuals discovered to have engaged in wide-scale serial plagiarism in philosophy are relatively few, but the academic publishers falling victim to them are many. Some of the most respected publishing houses in philosophy have recently faced the issue of having published plagiarized material. The chapter uses a specific context of serial plagiarism involving 43 articles and book chapters by one author of record as a test case. The various responses by these publishers to this instance of serial plagiarism provide a real-time snapshot of the practices for correcting the scholarly record in the discipline of philosophy. I propose a new rubric for evaluating published corrections of the scholarly record for cases of demonstrated plagiarism. On this rubric, the highest-scoring corrections are those that: (1) unambiguously declare that a plagiarized work is plagiarized, (2) clearly credit the original source material misappropriated in the act of plagiarism, and (3) are easily accessible to the scholarly community without registration barriers or paywalls. This analysis yields a twofold conclusion: first, relatively little uniformity exists among publishers in philosophy for responding to plagiarism; and second, the discipline of philosophy often falls short of the accepted practices for correcting the scholarly record in contrast to the natural sciences. This chapter considers only public, documented cases of academic plagiarism in philosophy and makes no new allegations of plagiarism.

This chapter introduces a book-length study on post-publication responses to academic plagiarism in humanities disciplines. Academic plagiarism damages the integrity of the scholarly record, corrupts the surrounding academic enterprise, and creates inefficiencies across all levels of knowledge production. The correction of the scholarly record for plagiarism is not a task for editors and publishers alone; each member of the research community has an indispensable role in maintaining the integrity of the published literature in the aftermath of plagiarism. The chapter identifies different senses of the expression ‘correcting the scholarly record,’ discusses the integrity of authorship, outlines the purpose of academic publishing, and distinguishes post-publication from pre-publication responses to plagiarism.

This chapter considers recent cases of contested authorship in two articles involving an American philosophy professor. The examination of these unusual publishing circumstances, which include allegations of self-plagiarism, places in high relief the requirements of genuine authorship, the complexity of some self-plagiarism claims, and the challenges of requesting corrections of the scholarly record. Differing standards of evidence are often proposed in considering whether to retract a published article for authorship violations, and the chapter evaluates these standards in light of potential benefits to the larger research community. Researchers, editors, and publishers sometimes conflate standards from legal, moral, and scientific domains, and a lack of clarity about the applicable standard can significantly delay a proper correction of the scholarly record.

Despite the essential role that academic whistleblowers serve in initiating the oftentimes lengthy process of correcting the scholarly record, individuals who disclose evidence of suspected plagiarism are often subject to considerable backlash. To be sure, the evidence they provide, even when impeccable, can create a significant workload of verification for editors and publishers, as well as for research integrity officers at the institutional homes of the suspected plagiarists. I examine the benefits and hazards of multi-targeted whistleblowing and discuss the harassment and witness intimidation typically experienced by those who blow the academic whistle in good faith. The increasing awareness among researchers and institutional authorities that to harass whistleblowers is itself a form of misconduct reflects an important recent shift in academic culture. On the other hand, academic whistleblowers in recent times have been described as post-publication vigilantes for their efforts in securing corrections of the scholarly record, so the professional dangers of academic whistleblowing should not be understated.

This dissertation is an historical and exegetical study of the concept of self-evidence as found in the works of the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. I have sought to identify all of the explicit self-evident propositions found in the writings of the Angelic Doctor, to indicate the terminology of the discussions of self-evidence, and to provide a context for understanding the appeals to self-evidence in the corpus thomisticum. To this end, the dissertation is divided into six sections. ;The introduction of the dissertation presents an account of the general neglect the concept of self-evidence has received by many contemporary philosophers. ;The first chapter is an examination of Aquinas's various definitions or descriptions of self-evidence. By examining the various ways in which definitions can be formulated, it is argued that self-evidence can be viewed as an equivocal notion, for there are different senses in which terms can be defined. ;In the second chapter I turn to Aquinas's doctrine of intellectual habits to explain how Aquinas justifies some of the divisions of self-evident propositions into classes. I argue that, for Aquinas, the designation of a proposition as self-evident is always, in itself, an incomplete characterization, requiring that it be supplemented with a more specific account of the intellectual habit whereby the proposition can be cognized precisely as self-evident. ;The third chapter examines a significant epistemic problem surrounding the cognition of self-evident propositions. Particular attention is paid to Aquinas's often-neglected doctrine that the essences of material things are hidden to human beings. ;The fourth chapter returns to a presentation of intellectual habits as that which allows for self-evident propositions to be cognized as self-evident. I focus on the habit of faith, and examine some texts that suggest that the intellect can be fortified with supernatural habits. ;The final chapter examines Aquinas's views on the role of self-evident propositions in moral psychology and moral science. The seven explicit ethical self-evident propositions from Aquinas's writings are set forth and discussed, with particular attention to the nature of the practical syllogism in moral decision-making. ;A summary of findings completes the dissertation.

The history of moral dilemma theory often ignores the medieval period, overlooking the sophisticated theorizing by several thinkers who debated the existence of moral dilemmas from 1150 to 1450. In this book Michael V. Dougherty offers a rich and fascinating overview of the debates which were pursued by medieval philosophers, theologians and canon lawyers, illustrating his discussion with a diverse range of examples of the moral dilemmas which they considered. He shows that much of what seems particular to twentieth-century moral theory was well-known long ago - especially the view of some medieval thinkers that some forms of wrongdoing are inescapable, and their emphasis on the principle 'choose the lesser of two evils'. His book will be valuable not only to advanced students and specialists of medieval thought, but also to those interested in the history of ethics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Opining the articuli fidei:Thomas Aquinas on the Heretic’s Assent to the Articles of FaithM. V. DoughertyTHOMAS AQUINAS’S ACCOUNT of the infused virtue (habitus) of faith presupposes that some intrinsically intelligible truths are beyond the range of the natural cognitive abilities of human beings. The possession of the virtue of faith allows the believer to transcend certain natural epistemic limitations so that he can assent to truths that are necessary for salvation. Consonant with the Catholic theological tradition, Aquinas refers to such truths as the articles of faith (articuli fidei), and stock examples include propositions concerning the Trinity and the Incarnation.1In light of the many and well-known texts from the Corpus Thomisticum that highlight the disproportion or incommensurability between the articles of faith and the natural cognitive abilities of human beings, it would not be unreasonable for one to assume that faith is required to assent to such articles of faith [End Page 1] in this life. Such an interpretive assumption could be expressed as:A1: A human being can assent to the articles of faith in this life if and only if the human being is fortified with the infused virtue of faith.One might be led to ascribe A1 to Aquinas when one considers that he criticizes the Pelagians precisely for maintaining that the assent to matters of faith is caused by nothing other than free will.2 Still further, one might think that strong evidence for A1 is Aquinas’s claim that “free will does not suffice for believing, since those things that are of faith are above reason.”3I argue, however, that A1’s identification of the virtue of faith as a necessary condition for the assent to the articles of faith does not adequately reflect Aquinas’s position, despite the many texts that may suggest such a view.4 That Aquinas does not endorse A1 can be made evident by examining his largely overlooked account of the epistemic state of the heretic (haereticus). To be sure, most commentators who explore the Thomistic treatment of heresy focus on the psychology of error underlying the heretic’s denial of one or more of the articles of faith.5 In the present paper I take an alternate path, however, focusing on those epistemic acts whereby the heretic gets its [End Page 2] right, so to speak, by correctly assenting to some of the articles of faith. Aquinas maintains that the heretic does not possess the infused virtue of faith yet still assents to all the articles of faith except for the one or more articles that he denies. Bereft of faith, the heretic “holds those things that are of faith by another mode than through faith.”6 This seemingly anomalous epistemic condition deserves consideration.7I. Intellects without FaithThe heretic appears to be cognitively privileged, since without faith he assents to the things that are of faith, seemingly overcoming without divine assistance the aforementioned disproportion between the limited range of reason and the articles of faith. Aquinas is aware of the apparent difficulty; in the Summa theologiae he defuses the rather unusual objection that heretics appear to have greater cognitive capacities than the faithful, since heretics routinely and unassistedly assent to those higher truths without possessing the virtue of faith.8 Aquinas concludes that the heretic holds the articles of faith by opinion (opinio), not faith.What makes one a heretic? Frequently Aquinas identifies obstinacy (pertinacia, instantia) as a necessary condition for heresy.9 The cause of heresy is at times identified with pride [End Page 3] (superbia).10 On Aquinas’s account, heresy is a species of unbelief (infidelitas) and every heretic is a schismatic.11 But the heretic does get many things right. If one were to deny all of the articles of faith, one would not qualify as a heretic, but would simply be a nonbeliever or an apostate. So, apart from the denial of an article (or a few articles) that specifies heretics as the distinct kind of heretic they happen to be, heretics for the most part succeed in assenting to most—but not all—of the articles of faith.Although the...

This article documents how a serial plagiarism case discovered over a decade ago continues to generate negative effects in the downstream research on medieval and early modern philosophy. The ongoing positive citation of the 40 plagiarizing articles and book chapters – including those retracted by their publishers – affects the reliability of later scholarship in several ways. The present state of affairs is the joint result of authors, editors, peer reviewers, and publishers who continue to allow (and in some cases, support) the publication of new works across a variety of genres that contain positive citations to the 40 plagiarizing articles and book chapters. The problem shows no signs of abating; the plagiarizing articles and book chapters continue to acquire positive citations in new publications, including authoritative reference works. The breach of research standards is further shown by the fact that even a non-existent publication by the plagiarist continues to acquire positive citations.

Despite an increased recognition that plagiarism in published research can take many forms, current typologies of plagiarism are far from complete. One under-recognized variety of plagiarism—designated here as compression plagiarism—consists of the distillation of a lengthy scholarly text into a short one, followed by the publication of the short one under a new name with inadequate credit to the original author. In typical cases, compression plagiarism is invisible to unsuspecting readers and immune to anti-plagiarism software. The persistence of uncorrected instances of plagiarism in all its forms—including compression plagiarism—in the body of published research literature has deleterious consequences for the reliability of scholarly communication. Not the least of these problems is that original authors are denied credit for their discoveries. When unsuspecting researchers read articles that are the products of plagiarism, they unwittingly engage the arguments of hidden original authors through the proxy of plagiarists. Furthermore, when these researchers later publish responses to the plagiarizing articles, not knowing they are engaging products of plagiarism, they create additional inefficiencies and redundancies in the body of published research. This article analyzes a suspected instance of compression plagiarism that appeared within the pages of this journal and considers the particular ways in which plagiarism of this variety weakens the quality of scholarly argumentation, with special attention paid to the field of philosophy.

Nearly all attempts to include Aquinas among the class of divine command theorists have focused on two kinds of texts: those exhibiting Aquinas’s treatment of the apparent immoralities of the patriarchs (e.g., Abraham’s intention to kill Isaac), and those pertaining to Aquinas’s discussion of the divine will. In the present paper, I lay out a third approach unrelated to these two. I argue that Aquinas’s explicit endorsement of one ethical proposition as self-evident throughout his writings is sufficient justification to include Aquinas among the class of divine command theorists. I examine Aquinas’s persistent contention that the proposition “the commands of God are to be obeyed” is a self-evident or per se nota proposition of ethical reasoning, and I then trace Aquinas’s appeals to it in the Sentences commentary, De Veritate, and Quodlibet 3. I conclude with a discussion of passages where Aquinas argues that the experience of moral necessity or obligation requires reference to divine commands.

This article diagnoses the problem of plagiarism in academic books and articles in the disciplines of philosophy and theology. It identifies three impediments to institutional reform. They are: (1) a misplaced desire to preserve personal and institutional reputations; (2) a failure to recognize that attribution in academic writing admits of degrees; and (3) a disproportionate emphasis on the socalled “intention to plagiarize.” A detailed case study provides an illustration of the need for institutional reform in the post-publication processes in the disciplines of philosophy and theology.

Qualitative fieldwork research on sensitive topics sometimes requires that interviewees be granted confidentiality and anonymity. When qualitative researchers later publish their findings, they must ensure that any statements obtained during fieldwork interviews cannot be traced back to the interviewees. Given these protections to interviewees, the integrity of the published findings cannot usually be verified or replicated by third parties, and the scholarly community must trust the word of qualitative researchers when they publish their results. This trust is fundamentally abused, however, when researchers publish articles reporting qualitative fieldwork data that they never collected. Using only publicly available information, I argue that a 2017 article in an Elsevier foreign policy and international relations journal presents anonymised fieldwork interviews that could not have occurred as described. As an exercise in post-publication peer review (PPPR), this paper examines the evidence that calls into question the reliability of the putative fieldwork quotations. I show further that the 2017 article is not a unique case. The anonymity and confidentiality protections common in some areas of research create an ethical problem: the protections necessary for obtaining research data can be used as a cover to hide substandard research practices as well as research misconduct.

This volume is the first book-length study of disguised forms of plagiarism that mar the body of published research in humanities disciplines. As a contribution to applied research ethics, this practical guide offers a typology of the principal forms of disguised plagiarism. It provides detailed analyses, in-depth case studies, and useful flow charts to assist researchers, editors, and publishers in protecting the integrity of the body of published research literature. Disguised plagiarism is more subtle than copy-and-paste plagiarism; all its varieties involve some additional concealment that creates further distance between the plagiarizing text and its source. These disguised forms are the most difficult forms of plagiarism to detect. Readers of the volume will become acquainted with the subtler forms of plagiarism that corrupt the production and dissemination of knowledge in humanities fields. The book is valuable not only to those interested in research ethics, but also to those in humanities fields including philosophy, theology, and history.

Disguised plagiarism often goes undetected. An especially subtle type of disguised plagiarism is translation plagiarism, which occurs when the work of one author is republished in a different language with authorship credit taken by someone else. I focus on the challenge of demonstrating this subtle variety of plagiarism and examine the corruptive influence that plagiarizing articles exert on unsuspecting researchers who later cite them in the downstream literature as genuine products of research. I conclude by arguing that an open discussion of plagiarizing articles in philosophy is necessary for maintaining the reliability of the body of published research and for restoring integrity to scholarly communication.

This volume is the first book-length study on post-publication responses to academic plagiarism in humanities disciplines. It demonstrates that the correction of the scholarly literature for plagiarism is not a task for editors and publishers alone; each member of the research community has an indispensable role in maintaining the integrity of the published literature in the aftermath of plagiarism. If untreated, academic plagiarism damages the integrity of the scholarly record, corrupts the surrounding academic enterprise, and creates inefficiencies across all levels of knowledge production. By providing case studies from the field of philosophy and related disciplines, the volume exhibits that current post-publication responses to academic plagiarism are insufficient. It catalogues how humanities disciplines fall short in comparison with the natural and biomedical sciences for ensuring the integrity of the body of published research. This volume provides clarity about how to conceptualize the scholarly record, surveys the traditional methods for correcting it, and argues for new interventions to improve the reliability of the body of published research. The book is valuable not only to those in the field of philosophy and other humanities disciplines, but also to those interested in research ethics, meta-science, and the sociology of research.

IT IS CUSTOMARY TO CREDIT Aristotle with the discovery, or at least the first extant formulation, of the concept of self-evidence. Recent work in the history of science has suggested that Aristotle was indebted in this respect to earlier Greek geometrical models of demonstration, but these earlier texts no longer survive. However, in our present day, the merits of the ancient discovery suffer from neglect, and the very concept is met with suspicion. One finds, for instance, influential textbooks of the history of logic enjoining readers to acquire a “healthy skepticism of the concept of self-evidence.” Further, it is not uncommon for contemporary philosophers to reduce the concept of self-evidence to some kind of subjective feeling of certainty or even personal preference. The abandonment of the notion of self-evidence among contemporary philosophers is not a procedure limited to practitioners of logic, as representative views can be found among those who practice metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of science, legal philosophy, political philosophy, and epistemology. This demise of the concept of self-evidence among contemporary philosophers, although widespread, has not gone entirely unlamented, however.

In Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae one finds a rather unusual argument contending that human beings can lose their natures as the result of immoral or virtuous activity. A number of texts in the work argue that the polarities of beast and god serve as options for those who lead highly immoral or highly virtuous lives. This argument is examined in detail in light of its philosophical ancestry. I argue that those who think the Boethian doctrine is Platonic in origin tend to read the texts about the loss of human nature as metaphorical. I then suggest that if one places the argument in an Aristotelian context one is able to see it as a metaphysical argument, and moreparticularly, as part of Boethian psychology. This paper thus provides a new context for approaching Boethius’s contention that human beings can lose their natures.

This paper argues for the validity of inferences that take the form of: A is more X than B; therefore A and B are both X. After considering representative counterexamples, it is claimed that these inferences are valid if and only if the comparative terms in the inference are taken from no more than one comparative set, where a comparative set is understood to be comprised of a positive, comparative, and superlative, represented as {X, more X than, most X}. In all instances where arguments appearing to be of this form are invalid, it is the case that the argument has fallaciously taken terms from more than one comparative set. The fallacy of appealing to more than one comparative set in an inference involving comparative terms is shown to be analogous to the fallacy of equivocation in argumentation. The paper concludes by suggesting a conflation of logical issues with grammatical issues is the core difficulty leading some to consider inferences in the form of A is more X than B; therefore A and B are X to be invalid

In this paper, I argue that commentators have missed a significant clue given by Descartes in coming to understand his 'ontological' proof for the existence of God. In both the analytic and synthetic presentations of the proof throughout his writings, Descartes notes that the proof works 'in the same way' as a particular geometrical proof. I explore the significance of such a parallel, and conclude that Descartes could not have intended readers to think that the argument consists of some kind of intuition. I argue that for Descartes the attribute of existence is a 'second-order' attribute that is demonstrated to belong to the idea of God on the basis of 'first-order' attributes. The proof, properly understood, is in fact a demonstration. Having brought to light the geometrical parallels between the ontological and geometrical proofs, we have new evidence to resolve the 'intuition versus demonstration' controversy that has characterized much of the discussion of Descartes's ontological argument.