Quoting from the article:
Sometime after I accused his book of plagiarism, Hackethal “avoided Temple’s blog for years”. He says he was trying to prevent accidental plagiarism.
He’s way too steeped in Temple’s writing to accidentally commit plagiarism.
When I commented about Temple on a Substack post, Dennis Hackethal replied that “Your writing style parrots Temple so much,” demonstrating that Hackethal has read Elliot Temple’s work extensively—so extensively that he has detailed knowledge not only of Temple’s ideas but of Temple’s writing style. Hackethal also demonstrated this in other ways, e.g., by writing that I “display the same ‘hey I just want to know if I’m wrong’” attitude as Temple.
In other words, Hackethal is so deeply steeped in/familiar with Temple’s work that he has an intuitive feel for what Temple’s style, attitude, ideas, etc., are—and so he knows exactly what to give credit for if he genuinely wanted to avoid plagiarism. The idea that “he was trying to prevent accidental plagiarism” is honestly beyond ludicrous to me. There’s absolutely no excuse for him to not credit Temple—and his plagiarism is definitely not “accidental”.
Temple documents way more examples of this sort of thing in his “Other Copying” section of the article.
“CF’s most important original idea is the rejection of strong and weak arguments.” This is what my Yes or No Philosophy material is about.
I bought a copy of Temple’s “Yes or No Philosophy” product on Gumroad on June 9, 2020 (I just checked the receipt I was emailed), so I can confirm firsthand that Temple’s ideas—which Hackethal is now intentionally plagiarizing—predate Veritula by many years!
In the article, Temple quotes Hackethal:
That’s a fair concern if you’re talking about duplicate criticisms, which public intellectuals do field. The solution here is to publicly write a counter-criticism once and then refer to it again later.
In the article, Temple responds:
I called this a “library of criticism” in Yes or No Philosophy. Hackethal calls Veritula a “dictionary for ideas”. The “dictionary” keeps track of ideas and lets people refer to them again later so that they don’t “have same [sic] discussions over and over again”. My “library of criticism” also let people “refer” to “counter-criticisms [and regular criticisms] … again later”.
I saw that “library of criticism” idea in Temple’s “Yes or No Philosophy” product and liked it a lot. Hackethal renaming/rewording it as a “dictionary for ideas” reminds me of a school kid using a thesaurus to change words in an attempt to avoid triggering plagiarism checkers.
I’ve also talked about this repeatedly in my many essays (“Thinkers should write reusable answers to arguments”) on Paths Forward (“You can reuse answers that were already written down in the past, by you or others.” and “Most bad ideas get pretty repetitive. People will keep bringing up the same points over and over. That’s fine. They don’t know better. You can deal with it by answering the issue once, then after that refer people to your existing answer.”).
Temple also talked about it in a Gumroad product of his which I bought on June 20, 2020 (likewise predating Veritula by many years) called “Podcast: Getting Your Life and Thinking In Order” (though that particular Gumroad product appears to not be for sale anymore). I just revisited that product/podcast to double check that I’m remembering correctly. Skimming through it very quickly I found this at 48:04 of the podcast (transcribing the quote myself, my bold):
… so it’s never too overwhelming or stressful. And people worry that this is so time consuming and it looks time consuming to them because they’re behind but when you stay on top of things and you make reusable stuff—if your stuff is actually good enough quality that you can reuse it, that saves you so much time. If you can actually, you know, link someone to something you wrote 10 years ago and say here’s my answer to that question and I already wrote it. If you can just do that whenever you want about everything because you already wrote down what you think about all sorts of stuff and you have answers to so many questions already written down it’s not that hard to keep up anymore. Because you have all the resources created … like answers to questions and criticism already written down, already ready to go.
I think Temple talks about it way more too, but even just a quick skim found that quote! So it’s definitely an idea Temple talked about in many places long before Veritula. There’s no excuse for Hackethal to plagiarize it. I’m not sure how Hackethal thinks he can get away with it.
Creating CF took over 10,000 hours of largely unpaid effort while I worked other jobs, outside of philosophy, to support myself. I share CF ideas hoping people will learn from them or critique them. While CF isn’t very popular, if someone actually likes my ideas enough to study them, I don’t want to be plagiarized or misattributed.
I think that’s wonderfully admirable and I think that the absolute least(!) Hackethal could’ve done is give Temple credit. Really, I think he should’ve offered to financially support Temple too if he could. But he’s doing the opposite:
He’s trying to secure financial support for himself using my vision and my ability to develop good new philosophical ideas.
. Beyond appalling.
Hackethal believes the CF ideas he’s using, without crediting me, are extremely good, important and valuable.
I also think CF ideas are “extremely good, important and valuable” and that the world would be a much, much better place if they became widespread. I’d hate for CF ideas to be misattributed to some mediocre, social-climbing plagiarist.
Some people apparently now believe he has great, original philosophical ideas.
I think it’d be good if some people on this forum (or other fans of Temple, or anyone who knows the truth) politely informed/warned the people who post on Veritula (or who Hackethal talks with on social media) about Hackethal’s plagiarism. I’d want to know the truth if I were misled like that.
It took me over twenty years to develop CF to what it is today. Hackethal is misappropriating my life’s work as a shortcut. Instead of developing original ideas, which is hard, he found someone who isn’t famous (me) and is using their ideas without crediting them.
