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Philosophy in Focus: Freedom
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Freedom encompasses the power or right to act, speak, or think without hindrance or restraint. For centuries, philosophers have delved into its nature, limits, and profound implications, offering diverse perspectives and insights. Join us as we journey through the rich philosophical debates surrounding freedom from OUP authors and its significance in our lives.
We hope to inform and spark debate through the lens of OUP's content on this topic.
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Embodied Radical Freedom: An Interpretation of Sartre's Theory of Radical Choice
Berislav Marušić
3 October 2024
This paper offers an analytic reconstruction of Sartre’s theory of radical freedom. On the proposed interpretation, freedom is radical, because the freely chosen act and the reasons for choice are codependent: the freely chosen act grounds reasons by being based on them. Nonetheless, since freedom is embodied, there can be constraint on choice. Such constraint becomes intelligible once we properly understand the temporality of freedom. The chapter illustrates this through a close reading of Sartre’s example of the gambler and argues that it is part of the gambler’s mistake to think that all resolutions have to be remade at every instant ex nihilo...
The Dizziness of Freedom
David Rondel
22 May 2024
The first half of this chapter gives an overview of Søren Kierkegaard’s thinking about the nature and meaning of anxiety: about the kind of affect he takes anxiety to be; about why we are anxious and where anxiety comes from on his view; about what he means when he says, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.” The second half of the chapter considers how anxiety and freedom can be experienced as incompatible, even negatively correlated, states. That is, how anxiety has a tendency to supress the sense of a person’s freedom, and conversely, how a gain in freedom implies a corresponding diminution of anxiety...
The Problem of Freedom
P. F. Strawson and Jonathan Dancy
31 October 2024
Lecture 13 discusses the problem of freedom. Can there be a free event? Strawson supposes this is not logically impossible even though the truth of ‘every event is caused’ is analytic. The notion of causal impossibility is a pseudo-notion. There is only the logical impossibility that a causal law should be true despite a contrary instance. Strawson proposes that the sense of moral responsibility is the reflective consciousness of the experience of obligation, guilt, and remorse, coupled with the awareness in ourselves of motives whose conflict issues in experiences of obligation, guilt, and remorse...
Freedom
Karen Stohr
24 March 2022
This chapter discusses the importance of freedom in Kant's ethics, looking at his ideas about human nature and rationality. Kant thinks that we have to understand ourselves as free to choose courses of action. He describes this as freedom in a negative sense. But there is another sense in which, for Kant, we are free. This is the freedom that we exercise when we make choices in accordance with rational principles. Kant calls this positive freedom, and he thinks that we must also understand ourselves as being free in this positive sense. To have positive freedom is to be capable of acting for specifically moral reasons...
Time and Freedom
Adrian Bardon
7 May 2024
Is the future already written? According to the static theory of time, all so-called ‘future’ events timelessly be, distributed over the temporal dimension of spacetime. Since static theory seems to suggest that all facts just are what they are, with no distinction between the future and the ‘settled’ past, it might be taken to imply that we cannot change the future: if there is only one way for things to go, then we can’t choose otherwise than we in fact do. How can we be free, if we can’t choose otherwise than we do? Is the impossibility of free will really a consequence of...
Dancing Resistance, Re-creating the World: Philoxenic Relational Freedom
Allison Weir
7 May 2024
This chapter considers the histories and meanings of the round dances that are often performed as part of Indigenous resistance movements, to argue that these danced rituals are world-creating performances that challenge all forms of colonization and domination to enact a dangerous philoxenic form of democratic freedom: freedom in relationality. Drawing on Thomas Norton-Smith’s analysis of Indigenous story and ritual as world-creating performances, Weir considers Cree stories of the meanings of the round dance in light of Julia Kristeva’s Kleinian psychoanalytic theory of philoxenia...
Introduction: Freedom of Choice and Acceptance
Keith Lehrer
24 August 2023
The introduction discusses the human capacity to reconfigure how we conceive our world, ourselves in our world, and, even most remarkably perhaps, our world in us conceived by us. The book seeks a theory to explain the exercise of that capacity in terms of reflective freedom of choice in practice and theory. The goal is to explain as much as possible and to leave as little unexplained about freedom of choice. The introduction explains the idea of ultimate freedom of choice and offers a preliminary defense of its consistency with scientific explanation and determinism...
Freedom and Immorality: Ulrich, Schmid, Reinhold, and Kant
Paul Guyer
18 January 2024
This chapter examines the debate over freedom of the will triggered by J. A. H. Ulrich’s 1788 objection that Kant’s identification of morality with rationality left no room for evil yet imputable or responsible action. C. C. E. Schmid, C. L. Reinhold, and Kant himself all attempted to answer this objection with some form of a distinction between reason as the source of the moral law and will as the power to choose whether or not to abide by the moral law. Kant provided his version of the answer in part one of the Religion, first published as a journal article in 1792, and then with part two of the four-part book published in 1793...
Introduction: A Feminist Liberalism
Clare Chambers
28 February 2024
This chapter sets out the concept of feminist liberalism and distinguishes it from liberal feminism. Liberal feminism is a type of feminism that is sometimes described as ‘just about equality’; in addition, it understands freedom primarily in terms of choice. Feminist liberalism, in contrast, argues that a deeper conception of feminism is necessary for liberalism to secure the freedom and equality that are its core values. Feminism is necessary to counteract liberalism’s over-reliance on choice as a normative transformer: something that changes the normative character of a situation or inequality from unjust to just...
A Flicker of Freedom
Justin A. Capes
24 August 2023
This opening chapter introduces and clarifies the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP), a basic version of which says that a person is morally responsible for what he did only if he could have avoided doing it. The chapter also includes an explanation of why the principle is important, introduces the basic challenge posed to the principle by the Frankfurt cases, and discusses various attempts to address that challenge. The chapter concludes with a sketch of the fine-grained analysis of Frankfurt cases to be defended in the remaining four chapters of the book. If that analysis of the Frankfurt cases is correct, then far from being counterexamples to PAP, Frankfurt cases actually provide further confirmation of the principle...
“Our Leaders Do Not Take the Women into Consideration”: Empowering Black Women
Nneka D. Dennie (ed.)
23 November 2023
Chapter 2 demonstrates how Shadd Cary argued for women’s rights over a thirty-year period. She frequently emphasized women’s right to be involved in Black activism and women’s right to vote. During the antebellum era, Shadd Cary incorporated women into her analyses of abolition and racial uplift. At times, she discussed her personal experiences of sexist marginalization. At others, she criticized sexism among Black men. By the Reconstruction era, Shadd Cary had begun to devote specific attention to Black women’s labor and Black women’s suffrage. Documents from the 1870s and 1880s, such as a speech, an essay outline, organizational records, and a short story illustrate how Shadd Cary conceptualized citizenship and its gendered limitations amid major shifts in the US political landscape...
Freedom, Idealism, and Standpoints
Markus Kohl
22 June 2023
This chapter provides an interpretive framework for interpreting Kant’s views on freedom. It introduces various desiderata that any adequate interpretation must meet. It argues that certain prominent approaches, such as the metaphysically deflationary “two-standpoint” reading, fail some of these desiderata. The chapter defends a metaphysical dual-aspect reading of Kant’s transcendental idealism on the grounds that such a reading is uniquely suited to capture his views on human freedom. It articulates a key feature of Kohl’s interpretation: Kant’s doctrine involves a metaphysical belief in the existence of an atemporal...
Positive Freedom and the General Will
Piper L. Bringhurst and Gerald Gaus
26 April 2018
This chapter shows how one understanding of positive liberty—freedom as reasoned control—is presupposed by relations of moral responsibility. Rousseau’s “quixotic quest”—insuring that all subjects of the moral law remain morally free—is necessary to maintain responsibility relations within a moral community. Unless all are free to exercise reasoned control in accepting moral demands, they cannot be held responsible for failure to comply. We then inquire whether the concept of the general will can reconcile positive freedom and moral responsibility with regulation by a common moral law. Rousseau’s account seems inappropriate for a deeply diverse society because it holds that the general will arises from an essential identity of citizens’ interests...
Freedom in the Workplace: Elizabeth Anderson
Toby Buckle
21 October 2021
This chapter follows the argument of Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), particularly chapter 2. Is the modern workplace a threat to freedom? Specifically, Anderson argues that the workplace is a site government: where power is exercised over us government exists. If we ask what type of government workplaces are it is clear that the vast majority are dictatorships. The interviewer brings up the main counterarguments—surely we can leave bad jobs and freely negotiate the terms of employment elsewhere—and Anderson responds. This is followed by a discussion of why this topic has been comparatively neglected by political philosophy...
Schelling: Evil, Freedom, and Guilt
Guy Elgat
in
Being Guilty: Freedom, Responsibility, and Conscience in German Philosophy from Kant to Heidegger
23 December 2021
In this chapter, Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling’s thought on the phenomenon of guilt is examined. The main point established is that on the one hand, Schelling can be seen to follow in Kant’s footsteps in that he, too, sees guilt as ultimately grounded in a free, intelligible act. On the other hand, Schelling goes beyond Kant in that he holds that for guilt (empirical or ontological) to be justified, it is necessary that the human being constitute or choose his or her own being in a timeless and free deed. In other words, Schelling endorses a version of the transcendental argument for freedom where guilt implies that the human being is a free causa sui. Schelling’s conception of the human being as causa sui enables him to address the problem of infinite regress that beleaguers Kant’s view...
Introduction: Freedom and Word-Work
Lawrie Balfour
23 February 2023
This chapter introduces Toni Morrison’s contributions as a political thinker whose writing discloses the meanings of freedom in the shadow of slavery and colonialism. Freedom is one of the most prized and abused words in Americans’ political lexicon. Morrison’s work challenges the misuses of the word in popular culture and the narrowness of its definition by political theorists and philosophers. Through the creative use of words, especially through fiction-writing, she reconceives freedom as a collective practice rooted in African American history and culture. Balfour argues that Morrison draws her readers into a collaborative effort to remake the world in defiance of hierarchies of race, gender, class, or national membership...
Journal articles
Freedom, Omniscience and the Contingent A Priori
Fabio Lampert
Mind, Volume 134, Issue 533, January 2025, Pages 1–32, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzae058
One of the major challenges in the philosophy of religion is theological fatalism — roughly, the claim that divine omniscience is incompatible with free will. In this article, I present new reasons to be sceptical of what I consider to be the strongest argument for theological fatalism. First, I argue that divine foreknowledge is not necessary for an argument against free will if we take into account divine knowledge of contingent a priori truths.
Anne Pirrie, Kari Manum
Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 58, Issue 6, December 2024, Pages 895–909, https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhae017
We consider academic freedom in the context of broader developments in higher education. We suggest that the tenor of contemporary debates on the subject is a manifestation of pervasive forms of authoritarianism that undermine the university as a home of adventure, a place and space that is conducive to the conduct of free inquiry.
Cécile Laborde
Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, Volume 98, Issue 1, July 2024, Pages 27–46, https://doi.org/10.1093/arisup/akae005
Members of racial and sexual minorities often live in the fear of arbitrary interference from others—rogue police officers or sexual harassers. Are they unfree by dint of believing they are unfree? I draw on the republican theory of freedom—according to which we are unfree if we are subjected to a risk of arbitrary interference—to offer a qualified positive answer.
Aviv Reiter
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 82, Issue 1, Winter 2024, Pages 45–60, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpad062
Members of racial and sexual minorities often live in the fear of arbitrary interference from others—rogue police officers or sexual harassers. Are they unfree by dint of believing they are unfree? I draw on the republican theory of freedom—according to which we are unfree if we are subjected to a risk of arbitrary interference—to offer a qualified positive answer.
