How confident are you that getting permission is the normal practice? I guess it feels a very small amount strange given that you could put up a statue of them or whatever.
Medium. It’s what the ACM says, what the Simon Institute and (IIRC) the Parfit Scholarships did, I heard previously from a person like me at Oxford that doing this without authorisation seemed weird to them, and ~half of the time that unauthorized eponymous naming is tried, I’ve heard of it causing problems.
Edit: if you named a thing after someone from many centuries ago—Socrates, Bentham, etc that would seem better, because a request from relatives to stop using the name would be less credible, and it doesn’t give an impression that the prize was actually associated with that person.
But there are surely people who have a better sense.
Yeah, I agree we should consult a lawyer about it, but it’s 50 years after his death, which seems like a sufficient time that objections about reputation or damage to his estate wouldn’t hold water.
Edit: See other response—this should not be a problem.
Per my other comment, it seems there isn’t anyone to “confront us,” or at least, no one who obviously can authorize this, which makes objections seem unlikely and unreasonable.
How confident are you that getting permission is the normal practice? I guess it feels a very small amount strange given that you could put up a statue of them or whatever.
Medium. It’s what the ACM says, what the Simon Institute and (IIRC) the Parfit Scholarships did, I heard previously from a person like me at Oxford that doing this without authorisation seemed weird to them, and ~half of the time that unauthorized eponymous naming is tried, I’ve heard of it causing problems.
Edit: if you named a thing after someone from many centuries ago—Socrates, Bentham, etc that would seem better, because a request from relatives to stop using the name would be less credible, and it doesn’t give an impression that the prize was actually associated with that person.
But there are surely people who have a better sense.
Yeah, I agree we should consult a lawyer about it, but it’s 50 years after his death, which seems like a sufficient time that objections about reputation or damage to his estate wouldn’t hold water.
Edit: See other response—this should not be a problem.
FWIW, my guess would be that it is, or can be, legal, but that if they confronted you, you would want to change the name anyway.
Per my other comment, it seems there isn’t anyone to “confront us,” or at least, no one who obviously can authorize this, which makes objections seem unlikely and unreasonable.