Instructors: Jonathan Cole, Akeel Bilgrami
Though this is a graduate seminar, undergraduate juniors and seniors are permitted to enroll. There are no pre-requisites for the course. The fourteen weeks of the course will consist of a combination of 1) lectures by the instructors followed by discussions, 2) discussions with guest visitors who are distinguished scholars in the field and whose work will be pre-circulated to the seminar, and 3) presentations by students on the readings on the syllabus. Requirements: Strictly regular attendance, prior reading of weekly texts, and a term paper at the end of term of roughly 20-25 pages.
General Description: The concept of freedom is analytically complex and has a long and varied intellectual history. This course will focus on the concept as it emerged in the modern period (roughly since the seventeenth century in Europe) and focus in particular on three aspects of freedom. Though the primary interest of the seminar will be on political and academic freedom, it will be useful to begin with a very brief discussion of the most abstract dimension of freedom by asking what notion of freedom might individual human subjects be said to possess given the determinism that seems to be everywhere indicated by the comprehensive explanatory power of modern science.
