Ole Fogh Kirkeby


Ole Fogh Kirkeby is a Danish philosopher and a professor at Copenhagen Business School in the Philosophy of Leadership.

Education

He is a Doctor of Philosophy from Aarhus University, graduated with honours, 1994, with the dissertation "Event and Body-mind. A phenomenological-hermeneutic Analysis". He has an MA in the History of Ideas from Aarhus University.

Career

As a professional philosopher, Kirkeby focused on the event as the centre of being. In order to describe the event, he conceived it as a way in which the body-mind absorbed the event by being absorbed by it. The media in which this takes place is language. Thus Kirkeby combined the theory of language games, and the phenomenological tradition, with its emphasis on self-reflective being, and the theory of bodily incorporation developed by Merleau-Ponty, interpreted through the Stoic vocabulary of the event, into an epistemological theory of the way in which we are “evented”.
In his philosophical trilogy about the event, with the volumes ”Eventum Tantum – The Ethos of the Event ; Beauty Happens. The Aesthetics of the Event : and The Self happens. The Event of Consciousness 2008, he created a new framework for approaching the event.
Kirkeby developed a theory of the Good and Welfare, which will be published in the autumn 2011 by Gyldendal, Copenhagen.
Kirkeby also worked intensively with business economics, creating a new agenda for leadership, exerting a great influence on managers in Denmark. He focused a radical-normative perspective on leadership, emphasizing leadership virtues, the duty of the leader to make values real, and the indispensable importance of the leader to know himself. He wrote several bestsellers inside this field, among others The Philosophy of Management. A Radical-Normative Perspective ; The New Leadership ; and The Leadership of the Event and the Force of Action.
In English, these topics of business economics are published in the books Management Philosophy. A Radical-Normative Perspective, Heidelberg and New York: Springer Verlag 2000; The Virtue of Leadership. Copenhagen: CBS Press 2007; and The New Protreptic. The Concept and the Art. Copenhagen: CBS Press 2009.
Kirkeby has been active as an author of fiction with the books Philosophical Stories ; More Philosophical Short Stories.
From 1996 to 2000, Kirkeby co-developed and was the head of the studyboard at the MSc study programmes in Economics & Business Administration at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. In 2002, Kirkeby founded the Center for Art and Leadership at CBS, with particular emphasis on the way arts are able to inspire leadership. He still functions as its director. In 2003 he co-founded a Danish think tank on Public Governance together with The SAS Institute, Denmark. From 2006-2008 he was Professor II at Trøndelag Research & Development, Norway, in Art, business and philosophy.
In 2007 he developed experimental theatre together with Bent Noergaard, developing and participating in the play The Creative Human Being, Centre for Art and Science, SDU. In 2008 he hosted the re-casting the draft to a new law of Danish Theatre together with a group of experts. In 2010 he wrote the dramatic draft for Cantabile-II, Project Seek-to-Seek, participating himself as an actor.

Selected publications

Books in English