Online one can find an essay titled:
"Scientist of the Day - Immanuel Kant"
This entry is dated April 22, 2015, and is credited to this author:
Dr. William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City
https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/sc ... nuel-kant/
Here is the first paragraph:
Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, was born Apr. 22, 1724. Nearly every short biography of Kant includes a quotation from the end of the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), where Kant says: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe…: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me." That is indeed a handsome phrase, and one can see why biographers are much taken with it. However, such biographies almost always go immediately on to discuss Kant as moral philosopher and pass right over the first part of Kant's dicta, that the heavens and its laws are worthy of our admiration.
Professor Peterson,
in a June 24, 2025 entry, puts a small amount of effort into rearranging Dr. Ashworth's paragraph into what is typically (yes, even at BYU) defined as 'mosiac plagiarism':
DCP wrote:
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and the more steadily reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.”
The passage comes from the conclusion of his 1788 Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (the Critique of Practical Reason), one of Kant’s most important works, which focused on one of his central interests, moral philosophy. And, unsurprisingly, most of those who cite the passage proceed thereupon to discuss Kant as a moral philosopher. But he also paid serious attention to astronomy; he wasn’t merely writing an eloquent sentence with a nice parallelism between the deliverances of the conscience and the objective reality of the night sky.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... onomy.html
Back to the source:
Kant did more than just admire the heavens--he made several notable contributions to astronomy and cosmology before he descended the slippery slope into philosophy. In the 1750s, Kant read a review in a German journal of a book by Thomas Wright, An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750). The reviewer said that Wright claimed that the Milky Way was a clue to the distribution of stars in space, but the reviewer did not explain what that distribution was (the second image above, showing a cross-section of the Milky Way, is from Wright’s book, but Kant never saw it). Kant read this and immediately concluded that if we see a band of stars across the heavens, it must be because our star system is shaped like a broad thin disk, with the sun at the center. In a word, Kant proposed not only the existence of our Galaxy, but its proper shape. He announced his conclusion in Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (A Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, 1755).
In this book, Kant also suggested that some of the lens-shaped nebulae in the sky, such as the nebula in Andromeda (third image above) might be galaxies of stars just like our Milky Way Galaxy. However, Kant's innovative ideas went unnoticed for a long time. His publisher went bankrupt just as the book was printed; copies were confiscated by the courts and most of them disappeared. Even later printings are very scarce. We have in the History of Science Collection a copy of the second edition (1798), and we are very pleased to have it (fourth image above). We displayed it in our 2010 exhibition, Thinking outside the Sphere.
And now, Professor Peterson's take. He must have tired of mosaic plagiarism, or maybe he thought he could hide behind the first paragraph. For Whatever reason, this passage drops into word-for-word stealing of this intellectual property. The exact wording he steals is in blue:
Professor Daniel C. Peterson, plagiarizing, wrote:
Immanuel Kant did far more than merely passively admire the heavens: He made several notable contributions to astronomy and cosmology before coming to concentrate on philosophy. In the 1750s, Kant read a review in a German journal of a book by Thomas Wright, An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750). The reviewer said that Wright asserted that the Milky Way was a clue to the distribution of stars in space. This idea evidently caught Kant’s attention, and he soon concluded that, since we often see a clear and distinct band of stars across the heavens — the Milky Way — it must be because our star system is shaped like a broad thin disk and because we are looking at it edgewise In other words, Kant proposed not only the existence of our galaxy, but its proper shape.
Kant announced his conclusion in a 1755 book entitled Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (A Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens). In this book, he also suggested that some of the lens-shaped nebulae in the sky, such as the nebula in Andromeda, might be galaxies of stars just like our own Milky Way galaxy. However, Kant’s innovative ideas remained unnoticed for a long time. His publisher went bankrupt just as the book was printed; copies were confiscated by the courts and most of them disappeared. Even later printings of the book are very rare (and, accordingly, quite valuable)
Professor Peterson may attempt to argue, once again, that these are 'just notes' that he accidentally quoted, and of course he will properly attribute them in his future publications (just not this publication).
The problem is that it is obvious that Peterson made a sophomoric effort to rearrange the pronouns and change up some synonyms, apparently in an attempt to show he didn't plagiarize. However, his own University's Honor Code spells out quite clearly that attempts like that still constitute plagiarism.
The ongoing lack of integrity seen in Peterson's persistent habit of plagiarism is beyond explanation. How does he justify this level of dishonesty in himself?
