This institutional self-study investigated the use of text-matching software to prevent plagiarism by students in a Canadian university that did not have an institutional license for TMS at the time of the study. Assignments from a graduate-level engineering course were analyzed using iThenticate®. During the initial phase of the study, similarity scores from the first student assignments were collected to determine a baseline level of textual similarity. Students were then offered an educational intervention workshop on academic integrity. Another set of (...) similarity scores from consenting participants’ second assignments were then collected, and a statistically significant assignment effect was found between the similarity scores of the two assignments. The results of this study indicate that TMS, when used in conjunction with educational interventions about academic integrity, can be useful to students and educators to prevent and identify academic misconduct. This study adds to the growing body of empirical research about academic integrity in Canadian higher education and, in particular, in engineering fields. (shrink)

The historical figure of King Richard III of England has suffered defamation at the hands of Tudor propagandists and most pointedly from the quill of England’s most famous Bard. Consequently, popular memory has us believe that the king was indeed a sociopathic megalomaniac who murdered his own nephews in order to seize power. This paper examines and questions the historiography of Richard III, presents alternative options that absolve the King’s ill repute, and proposes that Richard III should be remembered as (...) a heroic warrior King rather than a psychopathic tyrant of the Tudors’ and Shakespeare’s history. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Enoch Powell claimed to have been an avid reader of Friedrich Nietzsche in his youth. But what exactly he took from this reading has never been investigated; hitherto there has been only speculation, and some sensationalism, centring upon the more dramatic themes of Nietzsche’s work and Powell’s thought: atheism, nationalism, and power. The first half of this article rehearses Powell’s discovery of Nietzsche, and surveys the suggestive elaborations hitherto provided by biographers and commentators – which, it is explained, are (...) poorly evidenced. The second half of the article details what is revealed in contemporary documentary evidence which, on this point, does not seem to have been consulted before: namely, unpublished notes and lectures found among the Papers of Enoch Powell, held by the Churchill Archives Centre at Cambridge. Evidence is presented that Nietzsche inspired (1) Powell’s interest in ancient Greek culture, (2) his theory of education, and (3) his notion of an exactness of ‘style’ in writing, thinking, and living, and the power of classical scholarship to inculcate it. (shrink)

Quentin Skinner has enduringly insisted that a past text cannot be ‘understood’ without the reader knowing something about its historical and linguistic context. But since the 1970s he has been attacked on this central point of all his work by authors maintaining that the text itself is the fundamental guide to the author’s intention, and that a separate study of the context cannot tell the historian anything that the text itself could not. Mark Bevir has spent much of the last (...) 20 years repeating a similar counter-argument. Although ‘study the linguistic context’ might be a useful heuristic maxim, Bevir says, it does not express a necessary or sufficient condition for understanding. But Skinner is right, and one of the figures he has consistently identified as a formative inspiration, R. G. Collingwood, has already (in his work of the 1930s) shown why. What Collingwood calls his ‘logic of question and answer’ explains why the historian cannot answer his characteristic ‘intention’ question about past texts without knowing the context of problems to which authors think they are offering solutions. The study of context is neither ‘prior’ (as Bevir incorrectly supposes) nor ‘separate’ (as Skinner inaccurately says), but it is, as Skinner maintains, nevertheless impossible to grasp an author’s intention without it. This ‘logic of question and answer’ also explains why, in history, dismissing the study of context is in fact a pre-judgement of evidence yet unseen. (shrink)

ABSTRACTR. G. Collingwood's New Leviathan presents an account of two ‘dialectical’ political processes that are ongoing in any body politic. Existing scholarship has already covered the first: a dialectic between a ‘social’ and a ‘non-social’ element, which Collingwood identifies in Hobbes. This essay elucidates a second: a dialectic between Liberals and Conservatives, which regulates the ‘percolation’ of liberty and the rate of recruitment into what Collingwood calls ‘the ruling class’. The details of this second dialectic are to be found not (...) in Hobbes, but in the work of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, yet Collingwood's connections to these fathers of ‘classical elite theory’ have not previously been discussed. (shrink)

Does R. G. Collingwood’s theory that concepts in philosophy are organized as “scales of forms” apply to his own work on the nature of history? Or is there some inconsistency between Collingwood’s work as a philosopher of history and as a theorist of philosophical method? This article surveys existing views among Collingwood specialists concerning the applicability of Collingwood’s “scale of forms” thesis to his own philosophy of history – especially the accounts of Leon Goldstein and Lionel Rubinoff – and outlines (...) the obvious objections to such an application. These objections however are found to be answerable. It is shown that Collingwood did indeed think that the scale of forms thesis should apply to the philosophy of history, and even that he identified the “highest” form in history as a kind of scientific research or inquiry. But it is not claimed that Collingwood identified the “lower” forms explicitly. An account is provided of the three distinct forms that can be identified in Collingwood’s philosophy of history, and of the “critical points” by which lower forms are negated and incorporated by higher forms. But it is also explained that these forms are not neatly coterminous with the stages in Western philosophical thinking about history as Collingwood narrates them in The Idea of History. (shrink)

R. G. Collingwood’s declaration that belief in “eternal questions” in philosophy is “merely a vulgar error, consequent on a kind of historical myopia which, deceived by superficial resemblances, failed to detect profound differences” has been vigorously discussed over the last sixty years, thanks partly to its resurrection by Quentin Skinner. But another of Collingwood’s provocative claims has been relatively neglected. If the claims and arguments of classic authors in the history of philosophy provide answers to questions that are not ours, (...) but that are in fact limited to the context of their own time; and if the purpose of history is to illuminate those answers in light of their historical contexts, should historians ask – as Collingwood claimed they “must” – not only “what was So-and-so’s theory on such and such a matter?”, but also “was he right?”? Should the historian of ideas in a world of changing questions nevertheless describe a theory as “false” or “true”, as Collingwood does, or is truth assessment no proper part of the history of philosophy? This essay draws on the full range of Collingwood’s writings, and presents his strongest case for the claim that historians “must” ask “the truth question” about old philosophy. (shrink)

Engagement happens when academics and non-academics form partnerships to create mutual understanding, and then take action together. An example is the “value web” work associated with W. K. Kellogg Foundation’s Food Systems Higher Education–Community Partnership. Partners nationally work on local food systems development by building value webs. “Value chains,” a concept with considerable currency in the private sector, involves creating non-hierarchical relationships among otherwise disparate actors and entities to achieve collective common goals. The value web concept is extended herein by (...) separating the values of the web itself, such as the value of collaboration, from values “in” the web, such as credence values associated with a product or service. By sharing and discussing case examples of work underway around the United States, the authors make a case for employing the value webs concept to represent a strategy for local food systems development, specifically, and for higher education–community partnerships, generally. (shrink)