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Diederik Stapel (1966) was a Dutch social psychologist who obtained his Ph.D. at the (in 1997), became professor of social psychology at the University of (in 2000) and subsequently at (in 2006). Here, he was appointed as Director of the (TIBER) and as Dean of the . In 2011, however, he formally and publicly admitted to having fabricated and manipulated data for at least 55 publications, from 2003 onwards. Because of the prominence of the perpetrator and the astounding scale of the fraud, Stapelgate quickly became a widely publicised and discussed misconduct case, both in the Netherlands and abroad, − and something of an epistemic trauma: for academic research in general and for social psychology in particular. Indeed, the name Stapel became synonymous with scientific fraud as such. After his formal dismissal and public condemnation (by a triad of committees established by three universities to investigate the case in depth), Stapel became marginalised and fell into a deep depression. Yet, in 2012 he resurfaced with an autobiographical account in Dutch entitled (Derailment), the first in a series of literary books written in the wake of his exposure, containing reflections on his experiences from a first-person perspective (Stapel 2012).

The aim of continental philosophy, as Hegel phrased it, is to develop a diagnostics of the present. This monograph adheres to this vocation by regarding research misconduct as a symptom, reflecting current changes in the ways in which knowledge is produced and evaluated. From a continental philosophy of science perspective, scientific research is a profoundly socio-cultural phenomenon, a transformative practice pervading society while at the same time being affected by social dynamics. Our overall starting point has been Lacan’s formula describing university discourse: