[lbo-talk] plagiarism watch

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Thu Dec 23 10:00:11 PST 2004


^^^^ CB:

"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants." --Isaac Newton

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A statement far older than Newton. Robert Merton wrote a whole book on the origin of the statement.

Little Richard stood on the shoulders of giants too.........

^^^^^^^ CB: In the context of this thread, the idea's significance is that Newton had some recognition that his ideas were collectively, not individually, created. We can then go on to argue that their ownership should be in the form social , not private property.

However, Newton was materially welloff, I think, and I don't think artists should starve just because their creativity is not as individual in origin as they might think.

Stephen Jay Gould discusses Merton and the history of the child as the father of the man in "Sweetness and Light" , the argument between the bee and the spider.

^^^^^^

http://www.kolel.org/pages/reb_on_the_web/shoulders.html

Stephen Jay Gould explains in his essay "Sweetness and Light" (in Dinosaur in a Haystack) that Newton actually didn't invent the idea of seeing farther by standing on the shoulders of giants. A similar phrase was first spoken (at least was first spoken where anyone bothered to record the fact) by a 12th century monk named Bernard of Chartres. Apparently the image kind of hung around for a few hundred years, and became popular in Newton's time. So Newton was simply referring to a well-known idea that he assumed Hooke would also know and be sympathetic to.

What's interesting, as Gould explains, is the reason that this idea of "standing on the shoulders of giants" was so popular in Newton's day. As modern science was gathering strength, proving itself more and more capable of explaining the world around us, there arose a conflict. The ancient Greek proto-scientists -- Aristotle and the gang -- were still held in great veneration. So how could modern pipsqueaks like Newton and his colleagues come along and overturn the teachings of the venerable ancients? Newton and colleagues used the "shoulders of giants" image to say that we can still venerate the ancients, even acknowledge that they were smarter than we are, and yet disagree with them and be right. According to Gould, this was part of the introduction into European culture of the idea of "progress," largely thanks to science.



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