i think what kills me about people annexing my ideas is that it is so easy not to, and that can just make your work cooler and better and more creative, right? these are things i would never do, because i want to know what people have said and are saying, and then i want to attack it or build on it. all zagzebski had to say was, as crispin sartwell argued (last year in the journal of philosophy), if a theory of justification must be meta-justified on the grounds that it is truth-conducive, that beliefs that are justified according to the theory are likelier to be true than beliefs that are not justified according to it (actually even that is not quite adequate as the exact statement; i am not going to hack at the weeds right here), then it is either redundant or incoherent. now, this helps me make the following argument. a lot of her work seems to depend on this one idea; that work could still be creative or innovative or important, even if it was built on my idea. nothing could be easier. let's say the nehamas situation is as i describe it. nothing could be easier than to mention my work and immunize yourself from the charge of appropriation (sartwell has developed a related view in his suck-ass book six names of beauty. even just that would be enough; i wouldn't have a problem after that. i obviously do not own sappho (no man did).)
so i say the (alleged) fact that zagzebski and nehamas were influenced by my work, and systematically attempted not to notice that they were, or pretended that they weren't, shows something terrible at their heart. they needed to present themselves as profound innovators, so they needed a new basic idea. i can quite see how i could be a source for that; i've literally had hundreds of them. but because i actually am creative, and confident of my creativity, i have to know, and i want to know, what is out there that i could build on or annihilate or turn inside out, so i can make the basic creative move at all. that they can't do that, yet want to appear in public as though they can by erasing their sources, shows that they can't in fact do very creative work, that they are aware of that fact, and are pretending to be someone (me, to be precise) who can do creative work.
so, i'd say any work produced by a person like that is bound to be mediocre and dishonest. and i don't pretend to be the only grad student or tenured prof who has good ideas. people who do that once do it all the time; that is what their scholarship is and their public persona. i very seriously would check every word these people ever wrote or spoke for charlatanry and appropriation. it's there, believe me.
