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Attacking the Essence of Scholarship

Work is progressing well on my book Fear and Dissembling on the controversy surrounding Joakim Garff’s biography of Kierkegaard. I became interested in the controversy not, as some appear to believe, because I had anything personal against Garff, but because I had, and continue to have, a strong objection to people being punished for being good at their jobs, as happened to Peter Tudvad when he was officially censured by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, the then director of the Kierkegaard Research Center in Copenhagen, for daring to go public with his criticisms of Garff’s book.

Open and honest debate is the lifeblood of scholarship and should, I believe, be defended at all costs. This is an issue of increasing concern because the private funding of work in the sciences has led to the suppression of much research with devastating results for the public welfare.  I thought I’d provide you with another sample of the material that will be in the book that is relevant to this timely issue and that is of interest not merely to Kierkegaard scholars, but to the general public. What follows is an article by Professor Frands Mortensen of Aarhus University that appeared in the newspaper Information in August of 2004, before the English translation of Garff’s book had appeared.

 

Cappelørn Should Resign

From Information: “Debate 8/4/04”

The summer brought us an interesting debate in the newspapers, namely the one surrounding the scholarly merit of the prize-winning biography SAK by Joakim Garff. Peter Tudvad’s comprehensive contribution identified a number of errors in the work and cast doubt on the reliability of much of the information it contains. He did this in Kierkegaardian polemical style so that both the content and the form of his criticisms aroused attention.

What was most interesting, however, was not the conduct of Garff and Tudvad, but of Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, the director of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center in Copenhagen where the two scholars are employed. He stated in Jyllands-Posten on July 29th that “I firmly believe that one should refrain from openly attacking a colleague, and Peter Tudvad did not, so far as I am aware, inform Garff of his decision [to go public with his criticisms of the book]. It was wrong of Garff not to correct the errors, but also wrong for Tudvad to point them out in the media.”

Here we have a director and head of scholarship of a publicly-funded research center who believes that scholars should not attack one another publicly because they are employed by the same institution, and that they should not publicly expose one another’s errors, but should do this only behind closed doors without the knowledge of the public?

That is quite simply outrageous and profoundly unacceptable. Cappelørn attacks the very essence of all scholarship–namely the public and open discussion of research. It’s possible that, because of the economic significance of research in the private sector, the attitude there is that it is best to correct errors away from the view of the public. For publicly-funded research, however, it is a mortal sin to conceal the fact that material that was published earlier (including in biographies) contains errors.

I cannot know, of course, how committed Cappelørn is to the view that scholars should not publicly criticize their colleagues. He maintains that he was not misquoted in Jyllands-Posten, yet he asserts in Information (July 29) that he is pleased to see scholarly disputes conducted in public and that the exposure of the errors in Garff’s book ought to lead scholars to view claims made in the work about Kierkegaard more skeptically.

What should thus be done about Cappelørn? If he is as good as his word, and encourages more public discussion [among the scholars at the center], then perhaps he ought to be allowed to remain as the director of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center. He ought properly, however, to resign his position as director. The trustees of the center ought, at the very least, to place him under stricter supervision, as is common in such cases in theological circles.

Those of us who are employed by publicly-funded research centers, ought to think long and hard about whether this is a sign of what we can expect when the new ordinances governing higher education in Denmark are completed and new directors of research centers are appointed.

Frands Mortensen

Professor

Aarhus Universi

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Glowing Review of Ways of Knowing!

I was pleased to discover a glowing review of my book Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology in the Sept 2011 issue of The Review of Metaphysics. The reviewer is Peter J. Mehl of the University of Central Arkansas. The review is basically a summary of the book, with a few comments toward the end.

The book, as the title suggests, is a study of Kierkegaard’s epistemology. Following a distinction Kierkegaard develops in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs, it divides knowledge into two types: objective and subjective. Objective knowledge, as Mehl explains, “is descriptive; it is not essentially related to the existence of the individual knower” (179). Subjective knowledge, on the other hand, “is so related and includes ethical and religious knowledge both of which are prescriptive” (179).  Each type of knowledge is further subdivided with the result that Kierkegaard’s epistemology emerges in this study as enormously complex.

Mehl asserts that Ways of Knowing is “a tightly reasoned and sharply focused study” (179). He particularly likes the observation that, according to Kierkegaard, “[t]heories in science and scholarship are always the product of the cooperative efforts of various individuals throughout the history of these disciplines and need … to be continually reverified within the evolving standards of verification agreed on by practitioners in these disciplines” (Ways of Knowing, 53). “This strikingly contemporary pragmatist understanding of empirical knowledge,” he observes, “would seem to have some relevance for our understandings in the psychological as well as the normative realm” (180). He laments, however, that the study “does not relate Kierkegaard’s thought to contemporary epistemological thought or to any particular philosophical or religious traditions” (181).

I understand Mehl’s frustration. The objective of my book, however, as I explain in the introduction, is simply to present in detail Kierkegaard’s views on knowledge and thus to encourage more scholarly work on Kierkegaard’s epistemology. There are only two books on this subject, and both are in German. Fortunately, Gegensatz Press will soon have an English translation of Martin Slotty’s Die Erkenntnisslehre S.A. Kierkegaards from 1915. It’s unlikely, however, that there will ever be an English translation of Anton Hügli’s excellent Die Erkenntniss der Subjektivität und die Objektivität des Erkennens from 1973. It seemed to me that what was needed now was simply to lay bare what Kierkegaard’s views on knowledge were. I decided to leave the task of relating those views to particular trends in philosophy, whether in the past or present, to later works.  There are thus numerous historical references in Ways of Knowing, but no detailed comparisons of Kierkegaard’s views with those of earlier philosophers, and there are only subtle allusions to problems that preoccupy contemporary epistemologists.

It’s not such a bad thing, however, that Mehl was frustrated by this. Similarities between Kierkegaard’s views and those of earlier thinkers such as Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and even Hegel, to name just a few, ought to leap off the page to specialists in the views of those figures. Ways of Knowing is thus a rich resource for scholars. All they need to do is to bring their own expertise to bear in drawing comparisons and –presto, a new scholarly article!

Of course, my objective was not primarily to provide other scholars with material for future articles but to present a study of manageable bulk that would, because of the modest nature of its objective, facilitate “tightly reasoned” analysis. And, of course, I wanted to provide myself with material for future articles, and perhaps even books. I have, in fact, decided on the project for the book I will do as soon as I’ve finished Fear and Dissembling and it has come directly out of my work on Ways of Knowing. I plan to send a copy to Mehl as a thank you for his lovely review.

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News and Forthcoming Posts…

This week was the last week of our fall term here at Drexel, so things have been pretty hectic. I’ve got some news though and several forthcoming posts I thought I ought to let you know about. First the news. Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (Oxford, 2009) is now available in a Kindle edition. I wrote in an earlier post that it was available in an electronic edition, but the Kindle edition is superior to that earlier electronic edition.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m a big fan of Kindle, and of electronic books in general. I’ve just discovered iBooks and although I’m not as big a fan of iBooks as of Kindle books, I do like how the pages turn in iBooks and that I can read books on my iPod Touch (you can do that with Kindle books too, I just haven’t tried it yet). The wonderful thing about electronic books is that they’re cheap, they take up no space, and they are a huge boon to scholarship in that they are searchable, and copying and pasting chunks of text into notes or scholarly articles really speeds up both research and writing.

I’m excited to see Crumbs on Kindle because the one thing I did not like about that edition was that it had no index. The Kindle edition makes an index superfluous, though. Why worry about an index when you can search the whole book for any word or phrase you want? The downside of the Kindle edition  is that it doesn’t have the page correlations to the latest Danish edition of Kierkegaard’s collected works, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, the way the paperback does, so if you plan to do serious scholarly work on either Repetition or Crumbs you will probably want to have both the paperback and the Kindle edition.

The Princeton editions of these works are not yet available in electronic format, so not only does the Oxford edition give you a better translation, it gives you one that is much more suited to scholarly work. If you have any doubts about the relative quality of the Oxford vs. Princeton translations, you can check out an excerpt of the former on The Smart Set website, or just download a sample onto your Kindle (you do have a Kindle, don’t you?).

Now for the forthcoming posts. I’ve been wanting to do a post on Joakim Garff’s talk at the AAR meeting in San Francisco two weeks ago. He made some good points that deserved a wider audience.  Garff graciously sent me a copy of the talk, so I’m going to do a post soon that will summarize and comment on it.

I also plan to do a post that will consist of an excerpt from the preface of Peter Tudvad’s book Stadier paa antisemitismens vej: Søren Kierkegaard og jøderne (stages on the way of anti-Semitism: Søren Kierkegaard and the Jews) (Rosinante, 2010). I translated the preface into English for a talk I gave for the Judaic Studies Program here at Drexel. The talk was very well received and made me think that other people might like to check out the preface as well.

Finally, I ran across a review of Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology (Baylor, 2010) in The Review of Metaphysics, so I plan to do a post that will summarize the review and provide some comments on it.

So there’s lots of good stuff coming soon!