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Talk:Søren Kierkegaard

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Former featured articleSøren Kierkegaard is a former featured article. Please see the links under Article milestones below for its original nomination page (for older articles, check the nomination archive) and why it was removed.
Main Page trophyThis article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on June 11, 2006.
On this day... Article milestones
DateProcessResult
November 19, 2005Featured article candidateNot promoted
February 23, 2006Peer reviewReviewed
March 2, 2006Good article nomineeListed
April 28, 2006Featured article candidatePromoted
March 15, 2010Featured article reviewDemoted
On this day... A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on May 5, 2017.
Current status: Former featured article

My edit of his degree from an MA to a PhD

[edit]

I was reading an article on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy today on Kierkegaard <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/#LifeWork>, and noted that the Magister degree in philosophy was noted as being equivalent to a contemporary PhD,

"After a prolonged period of study at the University of Copenhagen, Søren received a first degree in theology and a Magister degree in philosophy, with a dissertation dealing with irony as practiced by Socrates (On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates). The Magister degree was the equivalent of a contemporary doctorate, the title being changed to “doctor” some years later."

whereas it was listed as equivalent to an MA on this page, which would ill-inform users about the level of education he had attained. I have changed all references to a Master's to PhD to account for this (it would be similar if someone who graduated with the equivalent of a Bachelor's from Oxford was listed as having an MA, as the Bachelor's degrees there are often awarded as "Master's" even though they are not at the RFQ7 level--that is, the graduate level--in the UK's educational system). If anyone has any issues with this edit please discuss below.

I also request that another user with more editing experience add footnotes and hover-text near the entry in the infobox so as to add clarification for others who may have been mislead in the past about Kierkegaard's degree of educational attainment. Thanatos&Eros (talk) 02:05, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I want to thank you for making this change to the article, as the references to Kierkegaard's degree as a "master's degree" were definitely erroneous, as you stated.
After doing some reading about the Danish magister degree, and the history of degree levels more generally in the country, I elected to also eliminate references to Kierkegaard's degree as a "PhD". No reliable sources name his degree as a PhD, for the simple reason that it wasn't one. No matter how I drafted an explanatory note, it always seemed to me essentially original research. I have included a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia page in the footnote regarding his degree in the main body text, currently note 76 in "Early years (1813–1836) § Regine Olsen and graduation (1837–1841)" as I write this reply.
I also removed the parenthetical reference to his degree and graduation date from the infobox, which is supported by the example of infoboxes in high-quality articles such as Thomas Carlyle and Niels Bohr. As a counterpoint, Hegel and Isaac Newton's articles both list their degree names & conferral dates in the infobox, but in both cases there are multiple degrees (and in Hegel's case, institutions) involved.
If including the degree in the infobox seems more appropriate to you or others, my thinking is that it could be "(mag.art., 1841)" or "(doctorate, 1841)", with any wikilink being to the page titled Doctorate or one of its (sub-)sections. Peloneous(t)[c] 00:42, 30 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Paring down listed references, September 2024

[edit]

I removed a large number of items listed in "Sources", based on the sole criteria that they were not referenced in any footnotes in "Citations" (or in a couple cases, in the body text). Certainly that single criteria could lead to more references being removed than appropriate, as they may have been initially added as general references or can quite easily be mined for sourcing due to their high quality. Therefore, here's a complete list of the excised sources below—

Items with no author

Peloneous(t)[c] 00:14, 30 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]