Download or read book A Philosophy of Freedom written by Lars Svendsen and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom of speech, religion, choice, will—humans have fought, and continue to fight, for all of these. But what is human freedom really? Taking a broad approach across metaphysics, politics, and ethics, Lars Svendsen explores this question in his engaging book, while also looking at the threats freedom faces today. Though our behaviors, thoughts, and actions are restricted by social and legal rules, deadlines, and burdens, Svendsen argues that the fundamental requirement for living a human life is the ability to be free. A Philosophy of Freedom questions how we can successfully create meaningful lives when we are estranged from the very concept of freedom. Svendsen tackles such issues as the nature of free agency and the possibility of freedom in a universe governed by natural laws. He concludes that the true definition of personal freedom is first and foremost the liberty to devote yourself to what really matters to you—to realize the true value of the life you are living. Drawing on the fascinating debates around the possibility of freedom and its limits within society, this comprehensive investigation provides an accessible and insightful overview that will appeal to academics and general readers alike.
Download or read book Spinoza on Human Freedom written by Matthew J. Kisner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-10 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spinoza was one of the most influential figures of the Enlightenment, but his often obscure metaphysics makes it difficult to understand the ultimate message of his philosophy. Although he regarded freedom as the fundamental goal of his ethics and politics, his theory of freedom has not received sustained, comprehensive treatment. Spinoza holds that we attain freedom by governing ourselves according to practical principles, which express many of our deepest moral commitments. Matthew J. Kisner focuses on this theory and presents an alternative picture of the ethical project driving Spinoza's philosophical system. His study of the neglected practical philosophy provides an accessible and concrete picture of what it means to live as Spinoza's ethics envisioned.
Download or read book Force and Freedom written by Arthur Ripstein and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this masterful work, both an illumination of Kant’s thought and an important contribution to contemporary legal and political theory, Arthur Ripstein gives a comprehensive yet accessible account of Kant’s political philosophy. Ripstein shows that Kant’s thought is organized around two central claims: first, that legal institutions are not simply responses to human limitations or circumstances; indeed the requirements of justice can be articulated without recourse to views about human inclinations and vulnerabilities. Second, Kant argues for a distinctive moral principle, which restricts the legitimate use of force to the creation of a system of equal freedom. Ripstein’s description of the unity and philosophical plausibility of this dimension of Kant’s thought will be a revelation to political and legal scholars. In addition to providing a clear and coherent statement of the most misunderstood of Kant’s ideas, Ripstein also shows that Kant’s views remain conceptually powerful and morally appealing today. Ripstein defends the idea of equal freedom by examining several substantive areas of law—private rights, constitutional law, police powers, and punishment—and by demonstrating the compelling advantages of the Kantian framework over competing approaches.
Download or read book Concepts of Human Freedom written by and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Love As Human Freedom written by Paul A. Kottman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, Love As Human Freedom sees love as a practice that changes over time through which new social realities are brought into being. Love brings about, and helps us to explain, immense social-historical shifts—from the rise of feminism and the emergence of bourgeois family life, to the struggles for abortion rights and birth control and the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. Drawing on Hegel, Paul A. Kottman argues that love generates and explains expanded possibilities for freely lived lives. Through keen interpretations of the best known philosophical and literary depictions of its topic—including Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche, Ovid, Flaubert, and Tolstoy—his book treats love as a fundamental way that we humans make sense of temporal change, especially the inevitability of death and the propagation of life.
Download or read book Time and Freedom written by Christophe Bouton and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christophe Bouton's Time and Freedom addresses the problem of the relationship between time and freedom as a matter of practical philosophy, examining how the individual lives time and how her freedom is effective in time. Bouton first charts the history of modern philosophy's reengagement with the Aristotelian debate about future contingents, beginning with Leibniz. While Kant, Husserl, and their followers would engage time through theories of knowledge, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kierkegaard, and (later), Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas applied a phenomenological and existential methodology to time, but faced a problem of the temporality of human freedom. Bouton's is the first major work of its kind since Bergson's Time and Free Will (1889), and Bouton's "mystery of the future," in which the individual has freedom within the shifting bounds dictated by time, charts a new direction.
Download or read book A Social Theory of Freedom written by Mariam Thalos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Social Theory of Freedom, Mariam Thalos argues that the theory of human freedom should be a broadly social and political theory, rather than a theory that places itself in opposition to the issue of determinism. Thalos rejects the premise that a theory of freedom is fundamentally a theory of the metaphysics of constraint and, instead, lays out a political conception of freedom that is closely aligned with questions of social identity, self-development in contexts of intimate relationships, and social solidarity. Thalos argues that whether a person is free (in any context) depends upon a certain relationship of fit between that agent’s conception of themselves (both present and future), on the one hand, and the facts of their circumstances, on the other. Since relationships of fit are broadly logical, freedom is a logic—it is the logic of fit between one’s aspirations and one’s circumstances, what Thalos calls the logic of agency. The logic of agency, once fleshed out, becomes a broadly social and political theory that encompasses one’s self-conceptions as well as how these self-conceptions are generated, together with how they fit with the circumstances of one’s life. The theory of freedom proposed in this volume is fundamentally a political one.
Download or read book The concepts of human freedom and radical questioning in the works of Plato Ren Descartes and Albert Camus written by Ulrich Roschitsch and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2016-06-13 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay from the year 2015 in the subject Philosophy - General Essays, Eras, grade: 1,3, , course: Introduction to western Philosophy, language: English, abstract: The human freedom and the human capability to reflect about the circumstances of our existence are phenomenons that have puzzled philosophers, anthropologists and other scientists alike, since we can think. Over the course of history, especially the art of philosophy has seen many great thinkers reflecting on the nature of human freedom: Three of them – Plato, René Descartes, and Albert Camus – are the material on which this paper will retrace the development of the interpretation of human freedom. In doing so, it is very important to, first of all, define how Plato, Descartes, and Camus saw human freedom. After that, we can have a look at the key differences that are – or maybe are not – findable when comparing Plato's “Republic” and Descartes’ “Meditations on First Philosophy”, as well as when comparing Descartes' work and Camus' “The Myth of Sisyphus”. The goal of this analysis is to examine how the conception of human freedom changed from Plato over Descartes to Camus. This is crucial to completing the third and last part of this paper. That will be determining which thinker was most thoroughly committed to the radical questioning of things, that we nowadays hold to be the core value of philosophy. However, the goal of this paper is not to determine, who was the “best” philosopher, but rather to show how different their conceptions of human freedom and the human capacity to ask questions truly were.
Download or read book The Concept of Freedom in Anthropology written by David Bidney and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "The Concept of Freedom in Anthropology".
Download or read book Kant s Conception of Freedom written by Henry E. Allison and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-16 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the development of Kant's views on free will from earlier writings through the three Critiques and beyond.
Download or read book The Essence of Human Freedom written by Martin Heidegger and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-05-06 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Essence of Human Freedom is a fundamentaltext for understanding Heidegger's view of Greekphilosophy and its relationship to modernphilosophy. These previously untranslated lectureswere delivered by Heidegger at the University ofFreiburg in the summer of 1930.
Download or read book Explanation and Understanding written by Georg Henrik von Wright and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 'Explanation and Understanding' von Wright argues that human action cannot be explained causally by scientific or 'natural' laws, but must be understood 'intentionally'.
Download or read book Rationality Control and Freedom written by Curran F. Douglass and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-06-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subject of this book is the controversy—one of the oldest in philosophy—about whether it is possible to have freedom in the face of universal causal determinism. Of course, it is crucial to consider what such freedom might mean—in particular, there is an important distinction between libertarian “free will” and the more naturalistic view of freedom taken by compatibilists. This book provides background for laypersons through a historical survey of earlier views and some discussion and criticism of various contemporary views. In particular, it states and discusses the Consequence Argument, the most important argument challenging human freedom in recent literature. The main feature of the book is the argument for a solution: one that is within the compatibilist tradition, is naturalistic and in accord with findings of science and principles of engineering control theory. Some particular features of the offered solution include an argument for a close tie between freedom and control—where what is meant is the voluntary motion control of our bodies, and this “control” is understood naturalistically, by which the author means in accordance with concepts of engineering control theory and modern science. Such concepts are used to explain and demarcate the concept of “control” being used. Then it develops a working conception of what rationality is (since what is crucial is freedom in choice, and rationality is crucial to that), by reviewing texts on the subject by three expert authors (namely, Nathanson, Nozick, and Searle). It is argued that rationality is a species of biological learning control that involves deliberation; and that our freedom in choice is greatest when our choices are most rational.
Download or read book Philosophical Inquiries Into the Nature of Human Freedom written by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and published by Open Court Publishing. This book was released on 2003-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schelling was one of the foremost representatives of German Idealism, the equal of Fichte and Hegel. This is the only translation into English of one of his most important works.
Download or read book Toward a Concept of Human Freedom written by Eric J. Valdina and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Tragedy of Human Freedom written by Martien E. Brinkman and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2003 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human freedom has been the source of both the high points of humanity as well as of its low points, thus giving rise to the impression that it is a somewhat ambivalent concept. According to Martien Brinkman, the major factor in this ambivalence is the rather narrow meaning that the concept has received in the course of history. Freedom is, for the most part, understood as 'freedom from' or 'freedom to' but only rarely as 'freedom for'. However, it is precisely this latter understanding that is closest to the Christian understanding of freedom, which Brinkman defines as 'internal attachment'. In his view Christian freedom is at bottom characterized by that to which one commits oneself in trust. He sees primarily the Christian theology of baptism, with its accent on 'dying' and 'rising' with Christ as the model for the way in which one acquires freedom. Brinkman illustrates this in this study by means of a great number of biblical images and images borrowed from the historical debates between Augustine and Pelagius and Luther and Erasmus.
Download or read book Concepts of human freedom written by Maja Svilar and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
