Born:
February 9, 1947. Married. Four sons.
OFK
has an M.A. in the Histories of Ideas in 1974 from
the University of Aarhus, Denmark. The
MA thesis was published as a book with the title "The
Logic of Capital and History"(1975).
From
1974 to 1977 Assistant Professor in The Philosophy
of Science at The University of Roskilde and
granted a scholarship there too from 1977 to 1979
at the Institute of Technology and Society.
During
this scholarship OFK was engaged in uniting
Marxist economic theory and neo-classical
economics into a synthesis able to predict social
development through theoretical average prices and
profits constructed on the basis of the
differences between technological levels and
prices between trades. The result of this research
was the book "Marxism as an economic science"
(1979). A book highly praised among Scandinavian
social scientists.
From
1979 to 1983 OFK was engaged in the debates around
the consequences of automation-technology, and the
discussions of a possible, theoretically sound,
content of the concept of "alternative technology".
He had relations with the Danish Trade Unions as a
member of committees dealing with the consequences
of the new computer-technology for blue-collar
workers. He collaborated with the Institute of
Workers´ Control in Nottingham around the subject
of alternative technologies.
During
this period OFK published a severe critique of the
Marxian concept of technology and of the idea of
an inherent liberating force within capitalist
technological development, the title of which was
"Technology and Control. The revolution of
technology, the technology of revolution"(1983).
He was intensively engaged in the public debate
about Information Technology. During this period
OFK worked as a teacher at the universities of
Roskilde and Copenhagen, in sociology, economics,
the philosophy of science and musical sociology.
He also worked as a professional violinist.
From
1983-84 OFK was a research librarian within the
fields of mathematical and technological didactics
at the Pedagogical Library of Denmark. Here he
began to concentrate on the new technological
programme related to computer science: Artificial
Intelligence and its meta-programme, Cognitive
Science. From 1984 to 1986, where he was a senior
researcher, and from 1986, where he was an
associate professor in Systems Science, at The
Copenhagen Business School, he wrote what was
probably the first books in Danish on Artificial
Intelligence: "The Thoughts of the Machine"(1985),
"Expert Systems and Artificial Intelligence"(1987),
"Ethics, Planning and Knowledge Based
Systems"(1988), "Genuine Intelligence. On the
Programme of the Mind"(1989), "The Body-Mind.
Artificial Intelligence. The Art of The Impossible"(1989)
and (together with the engineer Torben Tambo) "The
Clock of God. About the Great Science and its
Culmination within Artificial Intelligence,
Computers and Neural Networks".
During
these years, 1984 to 1990, OFK was a member of The
Scandinavian Artificial Intelligence Society. He
published the subject article on "Cognitive
Science" in "The Encyclopaedia of Language and
Linguistics" on Pergamon Press (1993) and he
published great many articles on this subject
within scientific magazines. He also had a
long-lasting relation to The Danish Technological
University as a researcher and teacher creating
philosophical programmes for engineers
(1986-1997).
During
the years 1988-1990 OFK collaborated with The
Technical University of Bratislava in developing a
natural language understanding program. He was
also engaged in testing AI-software.
From
1986 to 1995 OFK was associate professor in The
Copenhagen Business School at the Institute of
Computer and Systems Science. He had an intensive
activity as a lecturer and consultant on the
cognitive aspects of Information Technology (Man-machine-interface)
and Artificial Intelligence during these years.
From
1995 OFK has been working at the new Department of
Management, Politics and Philosophy at CBS where
he was granted the position as "docent" in 1996.
In 1999 OFK was appointed Research Professor at
Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy,
CBS, within the field of "The Philosophy of
Management".
From
1990 OFK devoted all his time to creating a new
line within phenomenological philosophy with its
main accent on the concepts of the "body-mind" and
the "event". In 1994 he became a Doctor of
Philosophy at the University of Aarhus with the
thesis "Event and Body-mind. A
phenomenological-hermeneutic Analysis".
From
1994 OFK has written the following books on
Philosophy: "World, Word and Thought. Philosophy
of Language and Phenomenology"(1994), "The
Philosophy of Selfcesseity"(1996), "The Seasons of
Words. Fragments of a Meticulous
Philosophy"(Aphorisms, 1996), "On Significance.
Tetragrammatonical Reflections"(1998), and "Secunda
Philosophia" in 1999.
In
1997 OFK featured in the first Danish television
film about living Danish philosophers. He was a
consultant to the Radio Programme on The History
of the European Philosophy (1994)(broadcasted four
times) and he travelled as a lecturer on his
philosophy all over the country during the
nineties. He also published a lot of articles
within the field of phenomenological and "post-post-modern
philosophy" in scientific magazines and more
public media.
During
this period OFK was a member of the board of The
Society of Philosophy and Psychology (KUA), and he
represented CBS in the committee set up by the
minister do develop a new "philosophical
propaedeutics" to the higher education
institutions.
After
1995 OFK also began working with the topic of
"Management Philosophy". In 1998 he published the
book "The Philosophy of Management. A Radical
Normative Perspective", which was translated into
Swedish and in March 2000, in an enlarged edition
published in Engslish by Springer Verlag. One
might say, that it focuses on a transcendental
concept of ethics and on a shifting of emphasis
from rhetoric to a poetics of management. This
book has already been published in two editions.
It has aroused much interest in management circles
within public and private enterprise, in the
military, and in academic institutions, in
Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and has already let to
a lot of lectures to private and public
organisations and other types of contacts with
management - and to several curricular at Business
Schools.
In
March 2001 OFK published the book
"Organisationsfilosofi. En studie i liminalitet".
"Philosophy of Organizations. A Study in
Liminality". This tries to establish a
philosophical basis of organisational studies.
In
2002 OFK published the book “The Loyalty of
Employees.”
From
1995 to 1998 OFK was the leader and head of the
planning group of the new BA and MA study
programme in Philosophy and Economics at the
Copenhagen Business School.
During
this period OFK were intensively engaged as a
public lecturer on the subject of phenomenological
philosophy. From 1998 OFK was a member of the
research programme "Conjuring up a Region", a
collaboration between Sweden and Denmark. Here OFK
was granted half a year of full research time (first
half of 1999) from The Danish State's Council of
Social Research. During this period he visited
ISTUD in Stresa, Italy.
Since
1998 OFK has had an extensive occupation as a
public lecturer about the normative aspects of
management versus leadership (approx. 30 lectures
a year). He is a private consultant to firms and
to the state, regarding personal politics,
organisational change and managerial issues.
OFK is
a member of the editorial board of the new journal
"Tamara. Journal of Critical Post-modern
Organization Science", and a reviewer of several
international journals, and publishing companies,
among others "The Journal of Pragmatics", and
Blackwell.
In
2003 OFK, together with SAS Institute, created a
think tank with the goal to promote good
leadership within the area of public governance.
In
2003 OFK founded the Centre of Art & Leadership at
the CBS. The purpose of this centre is to create a
theoretically sound platform for comparing art and
leadership, and for transforming the produced
knowledge into practise. Especially the phenomenon
of a “normative creative” is investigated.
In
2004 published the book “The New Leadership"
Publications in English:
Books:
O.
Fogh Kirkeby: Management Philosophy. A
Radical-Normative Perspective. Heidelberg and New
York: Springer Verlag 2000.
Articles:
O.
Fogh Kirkeby: "Parallel Distributed Processing and
the Logical Categories of Learning", trykt i
Preecedings of the Scandinavian Conference on
Artificial Intelligence, 1988. IOS. Amsterdam -
Springfield, VA. 1988.
O.
Fogh Kirkeby: "Dual textuality and the
phenomenology of events: On some conceptual
problems in the article by M.H. Bickhard and
R.L.Campbell". Journal of Pragmatics. Vol. 17, Nos
5/6, June 1992.p.483.491.
O.
Fogh Kirkeby: Why Phenomenology and How? Institut
for Ledelse, Politik og Filosofi, HHK 1996. 31p.
O.
Fogh Kirkeby & Lone Malmborg: Imaginization as an
Approach to Interactive Multimedia. Trykt i
Cognitive Technology: In Search of a Humane
Interface. Edt. B.Gorayska & J. L. Mey(Editors).
Elsevier Science B.V. Holland 1996. p.41-57.
O.
Fogh Kirkeby: Event and Body-Mind. An Outline of a
post- postmodern Approach to Phenomenology.
Cybernetics & Human Knowing. Vol 4. No. 2-3.
31p.1997.
O.
Fogh Kirkeby: A Metaphor called "Mozart". Trykt i
Hermes. Journal of Linguistics. Århus:
Handelshøjskolen i Århus 24, 2000. 21p.
O.
Fogh Kirkeby: Towards a Hemerneutics of Regions.
In “Invoking a Transnational Metropolis. The
Making of the Øresund Region.” Red. P.O.Berg et
al. Lund: Studentlitteratur 2000. 26 p.
"Reflections
on Organisational Therapy". I Philosophy in
Society, edt. by H.Herrestad et.a. Unipubforlag.
Oslo 2002.
”Thoughts on the Opposite of the Event”, i The
Vital Coincidence, red.
J. Hein & F. Janning, Walther Koenig Books, 2003.
“The
Greeek Square, or. The Normative challenge of
Aesthetics”
“Ephemera, Critical dialogues on organisations”
ISSN 1473-2868. 22 p. Nov. 2003.
Loyalty and the Sense of Place. In “Spiritual and
Ethics in Management”, edt. L. Zolnay. Kluwer,
Dordrecht. Forthcoming.
