Fatness or Swelling; an analysis of (non)scholarly articles in humanities

Fatness or Swelling; an analysis of (non)scholarly articles in humanities

 

Seyyed Hassan Eslami Ardakani, PhD

Associate Professor at URD

 

While it is supposed that scholarly articles that are published in academic journals contain the newest data or findings in related fields, in fact most of them, especially in humanities, lack this feature and have nothing new to say. In fact, these articles in spite of following the required rules, such as writing abstracts, keywords, and hypotheses, are worthless, time-wasting, and we should not bother ourselves by reading them. This article tries to analyze this kind of articles and show what is wrong with them. After reading many of these articles carefully, the writer's findings show that instead of having specific aims or problems to solve, they are some sort of collage-writing, deceiving, and non-scholarly articles in disguise.

Keywords: research ethics, academic society, ethics of science, scholarly articles-pathology, knowledge-creation.

published in: Methodology of Social Sciences and Humanities Journal, Vol. 19, No. 74-75, Spring&Summer 2013.

Mulla Sadra and the problem of plagiarism; a reevaluation of apologies

Mulla Sadra and the problem of plagiarism; a reevaluation of apologies

Mulla Sadra, or Sadr Al-din Muhammad Shirazi (c. 979/1571-1050/1640) is the founder of Hekmate Mota'liea school of thought and one of the most important Shi'a philosophers in Iran during three past centuries. He attempted to synthesize the rival schools of thought in his period. The result was bringing into being a new synthesis that later was known as Hekmate Mota'liea or the "Transcendent Philosophy" or as some contemporary thinkers prefer, "Transcendent Theosophy". He was prolific author and wrote many significant books, including Al-Asfar Alaqliea Al-Arba'a, or the Four Intellectual Journeys.

More than one hundred years agoAbo Al-Hassne Jelwe, an Iranian philosopher and a famous exponent of Ibne Sina's philosophy, revealed Mulla Sadra's huge indebtedenss to other philosopher's works, without acknowledging it properly.

The problem was that Mulla Sadra had borrowed the exact words, sentences, paragraphs, and in some cases the whole chapters of famous thinkers' works, such as Al-Ghazzali and Al-Razi's books, while he did not mention them appropriately or citing them correctly. So, he was accused of committing plagiarism, by his opponents. To invalidate this accusation, his followers and defenders tried to justify, or in some cases rationalize, his deed by proposing some apologies. According to one of them, for example, plagiarism was not a morally wrong in his period, and according to the other, the borrowed sentences and sections were trivial information and common knowledge, not genuine thoughts.

The author of this paper, first of all, has gathered and classified these apologies into six types. Secondly, has attempted to show that all them are insufficient and cannot prove anything in Mulla Sadra's interest. Finally, the author has come to the conclusion that the accusation of plagiarism that is launched against Mulla Sadra is still powerful and cannot be defeated easily.

This paper (in Farsi)  is published in: Ayeneh-ye- Pazhoohesh, vol. 22, no.5,  Des 2011-Jan 2012.

The status of Research Ethics in Persian Books on Research Method: A critical assessment

abstract

Academic circles have believed that science and ethics cannot be separated, so the students are taught to learn research ethics and apply the rules of ethical conduct in their term papers and theses or dissertations. From this point of view, the writer of this paper conducted a research on the research books that are written in Persian, to discover the amount of presence of research ethics in these books and the coverage of the issues facing the students in the process of their research. The result shows that the positivistic approach concerning the distinction between facts and value is still dominant in most of these educational books, and they have not freed themselves from this positivistic heritage. In the end, the writer has proposed a solution for overcoming this ethical and educational problem.

Keywords:

Persian Research ethics, Academic Research, the fact/value problem in research books.

published in Metodology of Sicial Science and Humanities, 2012, Issue 69

Also see:

 My selected essays on research ethics (Farsi)