A few months ago, Eric reported on the ‘scholarly detective work’ done by Mark Anderson on Julian Young’s biography of Nietzsche and what could be described as its ‘excessive reliance’ on other sources without proper acknowledgment (what Eric described as ‘less-than-generous citation practices’). Anderson meticulously documents some of the striking similarities between whole passages of Young’s book and earlier Nietzsche biographies. In Mohan’s recent post on academic misconduct, Anderson informs us that his piece is now online, as well as Young’s reply (highly unconvincing, if you ask me).
Anderson does not use the term ‘plagiarism’ anywhere in his piece, but it is hard to see how the ‘similarities’ he documents could be described in any other way. (To be clear, the responsibility for bringing in the p-word here is entirely mine.) We’ve had a few recent cases of plagiarism in philosophy (most notably the case of Martin Stone), but it is quite rare that someone actually does the painstaking and courageous work of documenting it as Anderson did. It deserves to be widely read, hence my bringing this up again here at New APPS.
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