David Kolb (born 1939) is an American philosopher and the
Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at
Bates College in
Maine
Maine ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the United States, and the northeasternmost state in the Contiguous United States. It borders New Hampshire to the west, the Gulf of Maine to the southeast, and the Provinces and ...
.
Kolb received a B.A. from
Fordham University
Fordham University is a Private university, private Society of Jesus, Jesuit research university in New York City, United States. Established in 1841, it is named after the Fordham, Bronx, Fordham neighborhood of the Bronx in which its origina ...
in 1963 and an M.A. in 1965. He later received a M.Phil. from
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...
in 1970 and a Ph.D. in 1972. Kolb's dissertation was titled "Conceptual Pluralism and Rationality." Most of Kolb's writing deals with "what it means to live with historical connections and traditions at a time when we can no longer be totally defined by that history." Professor Kolb taught at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...
before moving to Bates in 1977 and teaching there until 2005, when he took emeritus status.
Electronic literature
Kolb was also an early experimenter in hypertext and electronic literature. His work, ''Socrates in the Labyrinth: Hypertext, Argument, Philosophy'', 1994 from
Eastgate Systems is a philosophical work in five files (title, Habermas Pyramid, Earth Orbit, Cleavings, and Aristotle’s Argument). The work was done in
Storyspace, a hypertextual writing program. A traversal of the work with documentation and scholarship about it is archived by
The NEXT Museum.
A second work, ''Caged Texts,'' was originally intended to accompany this main work, but remained unpublished until 2023, when it was resurrected in
The NEXT Museum and featured in
The Digital Review. ''Caged Texts'' experiments with random elements as a homage to
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...
's experimentation with random content. As
Dene Grigar notes, this reimagined web version maintains the original random elements within the hypertext structure and takes advantage of web elements to also randomize the interface for a further representation of this experimental approach.
Selected works
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See also
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American philosophy
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List of Bates College people
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Lists of philosophers
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List of American philosophers
American philosophy is the activity, corpus, and tradition of philosophers affiliated with the United States. The ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' notes that while it lacks a "core of defining features, American Philosophy can neverthe ...
References
External links
dkolb.orgbates.edu
1939 births
Living people
20th-century American philosophers
21st-century American philosophers
American logicians
American metaphysics writers
American political philosophers
Bates College faculty
Fordham University alumni
Hegelian philosophers
Idealists
Neo-romanticism
American social philosophers
Theoretical historians
Yale University alumni
{{US-philosopher-stub
American electronic literature writers