David Kolb (born 1939[1]) is an American philosopher and the Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Bates College in Maine.
Kolb received a B.A. from Fordham University in 1963 and an M.A. in 1965. He later received a M.Phil. from Yale University in 1970 and a Ph.D. in 1972. Kolb's dissertation was titled "Conceptual Pluralism and Rationality."[2] 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 before moving to Bates in 1977 and teaching there until 2005, when he took emeritus status.
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).[3] 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.[4]
A second work, Caged Texts, was originally intended to accompany this main work, but remained unpublished until 2023, when it was resurrected in The NEXT Museum and featured in The Digital Review.[5] Caged Texts experiments with random elements as a homage to John Cage'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.[6]