My 4th Year BA Aristotle essay: McKeon's edition
In my previous post, it may seem as though my BA Dissertation supervisor, Professor Anthony Price managed to sustain an ethos of "courteous formality" at all times while I was a student. The unsuspecting reader may assume he was only prone to random fits that impacted on my academic work and more after I had graduated, around the time I was gathering referees. Not so. He was generally a fitful person, whether in lectures (claiming he would storm out of the lecture theatre and not return if a certain group of students wouldn't immediately settle down {no I wasn't one of these noiser students}); supervisions (such as his fitful insistence that empathy is never referred to as an emotion in that edition of Hume's text) and tutorials (as I shall explain in this post).
I didn't take it seriously as a student, you just learn to weather his melodramatic fits. So I dismissed it at the time as irrelevant to my studies and academic work. Especially since neither he, nor anybody else, ever so much as raised any queries or issues with any of my written work or academic integrity throughout my degree. So I correctly assumed that it must simply be his confrontational style as a philosopher, nothing more.
However, after listening to certain strange hints in talks recently, and continually learning more and more about the publishing process within academic journals, I'm starting to realise that it's not as simple as that. And perhaps it's a topic that is of public interest, therefore, worth exploring, so students out there learn about some of the more obscure ways markers can try to deviously and, dare I say, maliciously damage their academic work and reputation.
For instance, a mere illogical, inaccurate, unsubstantiated 'hissy fit' from a marker/ tutorial tutor could carry lesser or greater unstated implications. For instance, when Professor Price claimed in his written and verbal feedback (in response to me quoting Aristotle) that Aristotle never wrote that, what did he mean? Was he:
1) falsely claiming I have misunderstood Aristotle, thus unfairly lowering my grade
2) falsely claiming I've cited a source that doesn't exist. The technical term for this, used in the context of retracting articles published in academic journals, is a phantom reference. If this type of error has genuinely occured and been proved, it is enough to cause a published paper to be retracted from a journal, which impacts on an academic's reputation, their work and it affects the university to which they are affiliated. So you shouldn't be saying this lightly to someone and in front of others (in my case my fellow tutorial students in my year group) without having clear evidence (which he didn't possess, quite the contrary!)
So perhaps it's best I clarify a few things, in more detail than in my previous posts, to prevent malicious gossip misleading people about the quality and integrity of my degree work.
On the 4th of March, 2013, the Spring term of my final year of my 4 year part-time BA Philosophy degree, I submitted my tutorial essay on Aristotle by email to the tutorial tutor, Professor Anthony Price, in the morning, before my group tutorial that evening on this topic and essay title, so he basically had all day to mark it:
He somehow managed to turn this essay marking around in a matter of minutes: within just 11 minutes he's already noticed my email, downloaded my attachment, marked it and sent it back. This is especially quick marking given that Professor Price wasn't the lecturer for this module. It was John Sellars (now currently Visiting Research Fellow at KCL) who lectured on Aristotle for 10 weeks for the Spring term half of this Level 6 Further History of Philosophy module (2013).
This sounded like positive enough overall feedback. You can read my essay in full on my academia.edu site here
However, this particular comment Professor Price made, in which he claims "Aristotle says no such thing, here or elsewhere" is especially proposterous. As you can see, he's linked this comment with the word "states" hence it's highlighted in darker yellow. Aristotle clearly did state this, at least according to this translation and edition I've referenced, otherwise I would not be able to provide a direct quote from my book, which I bought second hand.
Incidentally, McKeon, who edited this edition on Aristotle's works, wrote his PhD on Spinoza and helped write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Rorty was one of his subsequent students. I believe Susan James knows Rorty.
Not that I was aware of any of this at the time. I was only an Undergraduate student.
However, I've just looked up McKeon today. On McKeon's Wiki page, under the tab on his legacy, in the section titled The New Rhetoric, I've now learnt that McKeon's ideas on rhetoric were inspired by Aristotle and Quintilian or to quote his full name Marcus Fabius Quintilianus. And Quintilian was mentioned at last week's Cavendish on Literature conference that I attended. The name meant nothing to me last week but it does today.
So now I'm thinking: Did Anthony Price jump to the absurd conclusion that Susan James suggested this edition to me? Why on earth would she do that? And when, and how exactly did she manage this? I neither saw her alone nor did we email each other at any point in the fourth year. She never, at any point throughout the course, had any input or suggestions related to my BA course! How many times do I have to repeat myself?!
It's a handy fake narrative to circulate as a rumour and so cast negative aspersions on my academic integrity thus ruining my reputation not only then but from then on in. If that's not malicious, what is? What on earth are universities doing to innocent students?
And, besides, I bought this edition summer 2010 in a secondhand bookshop while I was on holiday with my parents and my uncle.
To return to this essay.
I initially assumed this was simply yet another example of the appalling, inaccurate, biased marking I generally received during my degree, which kept unfairly lowering my grades from a 1st to an upper 2nd.
However, during the tutorial that day, I realised Professor Price had put a ridiculous twist on it. He descended into having an outburst during which he began claiming, since Aristotle never wrote anything like this, he did not believe the book I had referenced existed. I explained that I have provided a completely accurate, direct quote from a book I bought and have at home, which is an extensive edition of Aristotle's works. He refused to be convinced that I had accurately quoted a translation and passage that reads like this, unless I prove the existence of this book to him by bringing the book in and pointing to the page and words I seem to have quoted. I thought this was a ludicrous suggestion, especially given that he is a specialist in Ancient Philosophy so should be familiar with all editions of Aristotle's writings and it is a very cumbersome, thick and heavy book to expect me to bring with me for him to see, when he could just find a copy himself to check it, if he were genuinely curious how it reads. Remember, these are the olden days before everyone could simply take a photo with a smartphone and upload it as an email attachment. And given his level of hysteria and outrageous remarks, I'm not sure if even this would have sufficed.
Nevertheless, even though this should not be necessary, I think it's about time I did show the page and passage for all to see. Here's the words I quoted accurately and referenced in a very detailed way, down to the range of lines the passage and words I'm referring to appear.
The sentence I summarised extremely closely to the textual evidence is 1150a lines 15-16: "The state of most people is intermediate, even if they lean more towards the worst states". As you can see clearly, the words "worst states" are irrefutably there on the page, so I have every right to argue that this edition reads Aristotle as arguing this in his Nicomachean Ethics. I have provided the page number, so it's perfectly easy to find in the edition I've referenced. I have my own copy of this book, but it's not an obscure edition, it's available at Senate House Library. So, as a lecturer / member of academic staff at a university that is located right next to Senate House and a university that fully belongs to the University of London, he could have simply checked the copy in their library before making wild claims about my work and academic ability and integrity. Their copy of this book has the same total number of pages as mine, so I doubt there's much difference, irrespective of printing editions.
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