Monday, November 1, 2021

Open Access copy of Dialectic of American Humanism

In the middle of 2021, I noticed that EBSCO had removed my Renascence article called "The Dialectic of American Humanism," from their library database called Academic Search Premier.

A while ago, I contacted the editors of Renascence, asking them if I could post a copy of my article in a repository such as ResearchGate. They said that I could post a version of it so long as it did not display their exact formating and layout. I could post a version with the exact text including indications of page breaks, but I could not scan the article and post the exact image of it as it was published in the journal.

After I learned this fact, I still did not post my own copy of the article out of respect for the journal. They do sell a copy for $20 on the Philosophy Documentation Center. I did not want to eliminate their ability to generate revenue on intellectual property. I disagree with the business model of the Internet in which companies give away intellectual property and make money by selling user data to third parties. (Yes, I realize that having this statement on Google's Blogger platform makes me a hypocrite.) Part of the reason Facebook needs to provoke people into hating each other is because they need to generate revenue when their business model does not allow them to charge a fair price for their software, such as What's App.

When EBSCO took down my article, however, colleagues on my own campus could not access a version of it. Therefore, I have decided to post a word processor output of the article on ResearchGate. You can now download the article The Dialectic of American Humanism: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Marsilio Ficino, and Paul Oskar Kristeller.