Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Saturday 30 October 2021

"Only two pages

of Luxembourg Prime Minister’s university thesis were not plagiarised."

It is unlikely that many care.


I was refused a degree because every one of my 9 papers on the philosophy of Schopenhauer was considered to be an adolescent, quasi-Nietzschean rant against Western philosophy in general.
My professor, Bryce Gallie, actually came to my delightful rural home (no electricity, no hot water, no indoor lavatory, beautiful dog) to express his regrets.  I had to comfort him and cheer him up - because I never had the slightest wish to obtain a degree.  I did a 3-year course in philosophy in order to become wiser, not to qualify myself for a job in mind-smothering academe.

As a result, George Zarnecki of the Courtauld Institute was very sorry, some years later, that he could not offer me a doctorate for my original work and fieldwork (mostly funded by my travel-loving mother, since I was, of course, happily unemployed) on 'marginal' romanesque and later mediæval sculptures.  I didn't mind at all.  I awarded myself the doctorate but almost never mentioned it. Not a single paragraph of my thesis* (sadly reduced by a 'respectable' publisher to a badly-illustrated book) has been plagiarised.  That book is now way out of print and has been superseded by a website and pdf.- which have, of course, been rifled for their photos.  

*The Iconography of Exhibitionism in Western European Medieval Sculpture.


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