https://www.davidmarkjacobson.com/news-notes daily 0.75 2016-07-19 https://www.davidmarkjacobson.com/home daily 1.0 2026-06-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59d50b46a8b2b0f97ba67b01/1508786082860-UAX40TNIGTTOQWHB8RIL/IMG_5983.JPG Dysfunctional Inheritances. Emersonian pragmatism and Kierkegaard's existentialism and ethics. David M. Jacobson is a writer, an attorney and an educator, who lives in Bellevue, Washington. This website contains a selection of his academic writings, as well as recent essays on topics in philosophy and literary and political theory. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59d50b46a8b2b0f97ba67b01/1521053265212-VFR36FZPIQUQ0ZHD4EZ3/JacobsonDavidEmersonsPragmaticFront.jpg Dysfunctional Inheritances. Emersonian pragmatism and Kierkegaard's existentialism and ethics. - Emerson's Pragmatic Vision "Emerson's Pragmatic Vision is an excellent and thorough piece of reflection and scholarship. Jacobson . . . shows how "The Method of Nature" marks a turning point in which Emerson moves decisively beyond his earlier humanism (with its attendant narcissism) toward a view which places the human process at the service of the much vaster and more compelling method of nature." Robert S. Corrigan "Jacobson is to be admired for always seeking to underscore the richness, or 'eloquence,' of Emerson's synthesis rather than merely expose it from the point of view of the later, more radically pragmatic vision . . . ." Jonathan Levin "For Jacobson, 'the duty Emerson ultimately sets out for the individual, his responsibility, . . . is to accommodate himself in earnest discernment to the power of the images that make up his world.' This provocative summation will strike a chord with Emerson scholars . . . ." Barbara Ryan https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59d50b46a8b2b0f97ba67b01/1507650262054-2CG1KEI655U5YJDM67RH/image-asset.jpeg Dysfunctional Inheritances. Emersonian pragmatism and Kierkegaard's existentialism and ethics. - "The Ethical Dimension" Since its beginnings there has been an assumption, which computer scientists have done little to discourage, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can reproduce every capacity of human intelligence. The idea is implicit in Alan Turing’s famous test, although it is diluted by his use of a standard of imitation rather than replication. It is explicit in the statement of purpose made by the group who met at Dartmouth in 1956 and gave AI its name: “The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” (McCarthy et.al., 1955). The conceit of a machine that duplicates human intelligence has been fundamental to AI research and has driven its advances. It has also migrated, not for the better, into the popular imagination, where it has generated the characteristic and most compelling anxiety people have about advances in AI research . . . It has seemed to me that it is important to ask why this idea appeared plausible to those men at Dartmouth. How did it occur to them to conjecture, apparently against the grain of common sense, that a machine could do everything the human mind can? What is the theoretical foundation of such a thought? https://www.davidmarkjacobson.com/about-us daily 0.75 2026-06-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59d50b46a8b2b0f97ba67b01/1507312945786-8WHM3QZT9QWNM858NA4J/IMG_6022.JPG Biography of David M. Jacobson, PhD. JD