Question Of Freedom Research Articles

Stirner and Foucault: Toward a Post-Kantian Freedom

1.Max Stirner and Michel Foucault are two thinkers not often examined together. However, it has been suggested that the long-ignored Stirner may be seen as a precursor to contemporary thought.1 Indeed, there are many extraordinary parallels between Stirner's critique of Enlightenment humanism, universal rationality, and essential identities, and similar critiques developed by thinkers such as Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. However, the purpose of this paper is not merely to situate Stirner in the poststructuralist tradition, but rather to examine his thinking on the question of freedom, and to explore the connections here with Foucault's own development of the concept in the context of power relations and subjectivity. Broadly speaking, both thinkers see the classical Kantian idea of freedom as deeply problematic, as it involves essentialist and universal presuppositions which are themselves often oppressive. Rather, the concept of freedom must be rethought. It can no longer be seen in solely negative terms, as freedom from constraint, but must involve more positive notions of individual autonomy, particularly the freedom of the individual to construct new modes of subjectivity. Stirner, as we shall see, dispenses with the classical notion of freedom altogether and develops a theory of ownness [Eigneheit] to describe this radical individual autonomy. I suggest in this paper that such a theory of ownness as a non-essentialist form of freedom has many similarities with Foucault's own project of freedom, which involves a critical ethos and an aestheticization of the self. Indeed, Foucault questions the anthropological and universal rational foundations of the discourse of freedom, redefining it in terms of ethical practices.2 Both Stirner and Foucault are therefore crucial to the understanding of freedom in a contemporary sense--they show that freedom can no longer be limited by rational absolutes and universal moral categories. They take the understanding of freedom beyond the confines of the Kantian project--grounding it instead in concrete and contingent strategies of the self.

Philosophically Based Limitations to Freedom of Speech in Virtual Communities

This paper applies political philosophy to the question of freedom of speech in virtual communities. It takes as its starting point the philosophical justifications given for freedom of speech in (Greenawalt, in Computers, Ethics and Social Values, Prentice-Hall, 1995). For each of these justifications I discuss the types of speech to which they apply, and implications for virtual communities. The justifications imply several limitations to freedom of speech within a well-run virtual community. I give some examples in which the existence of virtual communities can be used to reflect on extant philosophical arguments and practices. By applying the list of steps for thinking about systems given in (Churchman, in The Systems Approach, New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1968), I obtain a classification framework for thinking about the merits and demerits of a particular speech act, and describe a justification for freedom of speech, missing from Greenawalt's list, that this classification helped me to identify. I give a summary of practical suggestions for administrators of virtual communities. Finally, I discuss why I consider the question of how to regulate speech in virtual communities matters, from a global perspective.

Fresh air is a question of freedom in nursing homes

Fresh air is a question of freedom in nursing homes

Diderot and the Plot of History

Aristotle was the first to raise the metaphysical question of freedom and determinism in the context of literary theory. In its definition of plot, the Poetics maintains that while the events of history follow merely one after the other {meta tade), the events of poetry must follow one because of the other (dia tade) (1452a21).1 Fiction supplies the causal connection lacking in the realm of fact. This particular tenet was not destined to be the most authoritative element of Aristotle's system, for his own disciples immediately defied him by writing historical tragedies and tragic histories.2 Moreover, since antiq uity, historical thinkers have not hesitated to discern a causal connection in history and have even based their professional competence on that discernment. In short, history has aspired to the dignity of poetry by appropriating the concept of plot. Yet, the counter-Aristotelian concept of the plot of history need not vitiate the fundamental distinction between arbitrary and necessary sequence, or between chronological and logical order. When history simulates the coherence of fiction, fiction can cultivate the disorder of history in a corrective or compensa tory relationship consistent with Aristot?e's thesis. In the early modern period, when historians cultivated a predominantly aesthetic approach emphasizing the intelligible pattern of the past, fiction achieved remark able experiments in arbitrary action and gratuitous plot. From this juxtaposition, we may infer that the arbitrary plot developed as a corrective mimesis of history or a repudiation of historiography. Yet to draw this inference would be to rehabilitate the plot of history in the history of plot. If history has no pattern, can we discern a pattern among fictional works which subvert the very notions of sequence and order? Does literary history contend against the historical process? This hypothesis can be tested through a more careful definition of arbitrary or gratuitous action. Human action is often felt to be arbitrary when it responds neither to ethical norms nor to self-interest, as in the case of such French literary protagonists as Panurge, Mme. de la Pommeraye, Lafcadio, and Meursault. These figures may exemplify an enduring fascination with pure volition as a metaphysical, theological, or even political issue, but it is difficult to integrate their conduct in a

Human rights and the public sphere

… the question of freedom of expression… entails more than just a public space in which to differ. To me, and I beg you to forgive my bias, the issue of the freedom of expression is not about certain collective precepts and principles. or the formulation of common values but, like other issues related to human rights, in the beginning it is about violence and suffering. (Mohamad 1997)

The force of change: libraries as a social instrument: a concise case study of Iran

In spite of the rapid growth in both the scope and diversity of information available today, the development of information services has not been the same everywhere. A large factor in development, or under‐development, of information services in any given country is a function of society’s perception of the importance of such services in its decision‐making process. Iran has been treated as a case study. Regardless of its cultural diversity, Iran has still to get to grips with the question of freedom of information. The pace of social and technological development has caught many statesmen unprepared. Past studies had indicated that, in Iran, only those information services that had adopted a result‐oriented approach to management, and had vigorous user‐education programmes, are successful. The growth of Iranian information services took place following the end of the war, with the influx of research and combat engineers in both the private and government sectors.

Deleuze and the Ethics of the Prepersonal

The dissolution of the subject has been one of the staples of continental philosophy for the last half century or so. This dissolution has been asserted, denied, championed, and bemoaned by various thinkers across the philosophic, literary, and political spectrum. What has received less attention is the question of what the subject is dissolving into, of what is left in the wake of the dissolved subject, the fragmented Self, the cracked I. Moreover, this question involves not only what becomes of the subject but also what becomes of the correlative entities that the subject has fundamental relations to, namely, the Other and community. One of the more promising ways of addressing this problem lies in Gilles Deleuze's notion of the prepersonal. The prepersonal functions as both that which constitutes the subject and that into which the subject dissolves. What I will do here is to explore this notion and the correlative notion of the Other that Deleuze offers. Following that I shall examine the notion of a prepersonal community and the possibilities and dangers that that presents. As a propadeutic let me sketch out how we become who we are and what freedom is for Deleuze. The short answer to the first question is that we are produced, or actualized, by series of prepersonal singularities that are not contained by the individual so formed. As to the second question, freedom exists in the field of the prepersonal and not in the field of the individual or personal. These sketches, to be sure, are promissory notes at best-cashing them out will be the bulk of this exercise. But they suffice for the moment to gesture to the image of the subject, the Other, and the community towards which we are bound. If we are constituted by a field of prepersonals that are not themselves personal (and not contained by the subject), then, to a great extent, we are all composed of the Same (albeit through a differential repetition of the Same that precludes us from becoming that). The distance between the Same and the Other is reduced such that the Other is not Other than me but an Other which I myself am. Moreover, the question of freedom here does not involve what I choose, since I do not have the faculty of free choice. At best, that which acts freely is what chooses within me, what wills within me. Having said all of that let me now turn to defining the admittedly slippery terms of Deleuzionary discourse that I have deployed in an effort to sketch out this view of the self and its Other. We must first recognize that in our time Deleuze is the philosopher most opposed to explanations in vertical terms of height and depth. For Deleuze there is no transcendent realm or term to which we can turn for a ground or foundation (whether that be Being, God, or the Forms) nor is there any depth of the self or the world that can explain all (no unconscious or economic explanation of reality). Reality is a series of intermeshing surfaces that interact and produce effects on one another in the composition of both human and nonhuman existence. Neither the unconscious nor Being exist at any vertical distance from the surface of our empirical life. The prepersonal must thus be thought of as something empirical, something that lies at the same level as the personal or individual, something co-present and active in our lives rather than a mythical or metaphysical element that lies at such a vertical distance from us, so that turning to it is an exercise in futility. Let me now turn to the constitution of the subject. Again, the subject is formed by the differential repetition of series of prepersonal singularities. The prepersonal is a field of forces, wills to power, that resonate with one another, that interact in ways that produce effects on one another, that enter into combinations with one another. Sexual drives, the surfaces of the body, aggression, one's internal organs, emotions, experiences, thoughts, sensations are all prepersonal. …

A Labour government will raise public health profile Consultants will prepare report on casualty services BMA re-emphasises condemnation of torture CMO attends consultants' committee Labour's plan to replace GP fundholding Reserve forces will not get special treatment BMA counselling scheme will start in April BMA supports regional public health consultants Medical students prepare safety guidelines

# A Labour government will raise public health profile {#article-title-2} A senior minister for public health and a dedicated public health unit in the Department of Health are two of the ways that the Labour party would raise the profile of the discipline if it wins the next election. The Labour shadow health secretary, Ms Harriet Harman, reinforced this commitment when she spoke at last week's meeting of the Committee for Public Health Medicine and Community Health. Public health, she said, was one of Britain's great achievements and she agreed that there should be further meetings to discuss the role of public health doctors under a Labour government. Ms Harman agreed that the minister would have to have clout and that each government department should consider the public health effects of its decisions, but she was not so sympathetic to the suggestion that he or she should not be in the health department but should have a role similar to the leader of the House of Commons. ### CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER MUST BE INDEPENDENT The chief medical officer had to have an independent voice and be a thorn in the side of government and the shadow minister agreed with Dr Noel Olsen that the dilution of the CMO's role was disastrous. She regretted the fact that public health doctors felt marginalised and demoralised and that this meant that some of the best doctors felt that public health medicine was not for them. She wanted to see a more aggressive role for public health doctors who should regard themselves as advocates. On the question of freedom of speech Ms Harman told the CPHMCH that she wanted everyone in the health professions to be able to speak out about their professional concerns. She reported that when she visited hospitals now she was taken round by managers and it was difficult to find out the views of doctors and nurses. …

Mass media in sub-Saharan Africa

Acknowledgments Introduction 1 The Precolonial Legacy 2 The Colonial Legacy 3 Broadcast Management 4 Radio Broadcasting 5 Television Broadcasting 6 Colonial History and Postcolonial Developments of the Press 7 Discourse Style, Oral Tradition, and the Question of Freedom in the Press 8 The Flowering of Democracy and the Press in the 1990s 9 Modernization, Development, and the Communitarian Social Agenda Notes References Cited Index

The Question of Freedom in Modern Arabic Literary Criticism

The Question of Freedom in Modern Arabic Literary Criticism

Long-Acting Contraceptives Ethical Guidance for Policymakers and Health Care Providers

Realizing the promise of long-acting contraceptives depends on continuing efforts to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate policies and practices. The current debates concerning Norplant and other long-term methods generally have based ethical judgment on too slim a reed. It is insufficient and overly divisive to limit the tools of analysis to questions of freedom and coercion. A richer perspective is needed. We have sketched out an alternative approach that rests on a close, case-by-case analysis attentive to the social dimension and consequences of contraceptive decisionmaking, as well as to the individual interests at stake. The approach also takes special note of the need for access to long-acting contraceptive, the possibility for mistaken nonuse as well as mistaken use, and our country's past and present biases and power imbalances. We do not claim that this method will make judgments about justifiable or unjustifiable influence easy or automatic. However, it should prove adept at underscoring the factors that require particular scrutiny. Perhaps more importantly, the approach highlights that influences for the use of long-acting contraceptives ought to be judged, not merely dismissed.

Pour une dogmatique de l'acte de la création

The author poses the question of the compatibility between cosmological and philosophical assertions concerning the creation of the world. He proposes as a reply the dogmatics of creation which starts from the original act of God's will who, in the creating word of the Logos, creates the world in its dynamic nature with, as its finality, the existence of man, logos of God in the creation. The author deals with space, time, geometry and the «legality» of the world with respect to the singular act of creation and with respect to the freedom of God. This justifies the necessity of incorporating in dogmatics the question of sin, which is the possibility of the dynamic nature of the world, and beauty, the beauty of the created world and the beauty created the man, which brings one back to the question of freedom.

Dretske on the Metaphysics of Freedom

Most philosophers of action have seen little or no connection between the individuation of action and questions of freedom and responsibility. Is this a mistake? According to a recent suggestion by Fred Dretske it may be. Dretske views overt actions not as observable events with a distinctive sort of causal history, but rather as causal sequences, in which a distinctive sort of inner cause produces the appropriate outcome. So when Jimmy voluntarily wiggles his ears, the motion of his ears is not his action; it is only a component of the action, its result. The entire action consists in an event-causal sequence wherein an inner event C causes the result: it is C’s causing the motion of Jimmy’s ears.

Educating the “Immortal Pupil”: Emerson's Identity Politics and the Question of Freedom in the Age of Reform

An Emersonian notion of originality and autonomy has over the last century and a half evolved into an enduring part of our cultural heritage. In a nation fractured by racial or class barriers, this assertive individualism continues for many to hold forth the hope of a fundamental principle overlapping our cultural divisions. Of course, this self-reliance has not gone unquestioned in an age of postmodern skepticism. If once a defiance of history and society seemed the American Adam's heroic gesture, recent critics such as Frank Lentricchia and Donald Pease have pointed out the Emersonian self s inescapable ties to the overdeterminate world of discourse. Not only have recent critics dismissed the plausibility of Emerson's idealism, they have disavowed its ideology of solipsistic independence that repudiates collective life. What I would like to do is to pose the problem of Emersonian individualism differently, to frame the terms of the debate less according to false oppositions between authenticity and culture, self and society, or freedom or fate, than in terms of complex negotiations about social authority undertaken in response to the “age of reform's” blurring of traditional distinctions between the public and private. In the second quarter of the 19th Century, the push toward state-sponsored education, specifically, was refiguring power in terms of socialization. Within his essays, Emerson acknowledges that identity is, and could only be, a social construct. Rather than trying to elude the fate of circumstances, Emerson, it might better be argued, attempts to redefine the nature and limitations of freedom in a world where, as he says in his lecture on “Culture” (March, 1851), “education” has superseded politics.

The plays of Caryl Churchill: theatre of empowerment

Questioning and Empowerment - Questions of Power: The Radio Plays - Questions of Freedom: The Television Plays - The Power of Choice - Reclaiming History - Sex and Gender - Labor and Capital - Revising Myth - Song of the Mute - Index

Stepsons in the Motherland: The Architectonics of Vasilii Grossman's Zhizn' i Sud'ba

The question of freedom and slavery tormented Grossman all his life.Semen LipkinArchitectonics designates those compositional principles that define a novel's structural and thematic coherence. The Greek term arkhitektonike, as glossed by Sir Philip Sidney in The Defense of Poesy, has the additional merit of offering a useful shorthand for my eclectic approach to Vasilii Grossman's novel: a pre-Saussurean concern for referent, parole, and authorial intent, combined with a structuralist focus on design and pattern–a search for the binary oppositions and governing motifs that make the work an integrated linguistic construct. I argue that Zhizn' i sud'ba requires such an approach and that only through coming to grips with the novel's architectonics shall we understand its meaning and appreciate its artistic energy.

A Study in St Anselm's Soteriology and Karl Barth's Theological Method

Recent discussion of St Anselm's theology of reconciliation has again raised the question of freedom in respect to the relationship presupposed between God and man in this encounter. It has been asked whether in fact St Anselm's account excludes God's ability to act freely, ‘within the dynamics and development of the narrative’, and suggested that such exclusion derives from an understanding of God's ‘unchanging nature beyond the influence of persons and events within the narrative’.

Crisis of revolutionary ideology in African aesthetics

O artigo coloca questões de grande importância acerca das relações entre arte e política, expressão e opressão e trata com propriedade do problema da liberdade como requisito da produção artística. O papel da arte como negação da condição sub-humana imposta pelo colonizador e a consequente concepção da expressão artística como via da recuperação da humanidade autêntica é enfatizado e tratado com a relevância que o tema merece.

Recommended for Summer Reading: Defining the True Function of the University: A Question of Freedom versus Control

Recommended for Summer Reading: Defining the True Function of the University: A Question of Freedom versus Control

The Portrait of a Lady: A Question of Freedom

T H E P O R T R A I T O F A L A D Y : A Q U E S T I O N O F F R E E D O M WAYNE TEMPLETON Simon Fraser University S u c h is the complex and subtle nature of The Portrait of a Lady that any of a myriad of interpretations is possible, and applicable, but no matter what the critic’s particular perspective is, he must eventually involve himself, as does the novel, as does the reader, with the question of Isabel Archer and her quest for freedom. She will be free, and in that this passionate desire of hers involves itself ultimately, as the title suggests, with seeing, with the develop­ ment of mature perception or expanded consciousness, the quest directs, even motivates, the entire action of the novel. It is a quest both social and philosophical, for it involves a woman who is at once a nineteenth-century American in Europe, married, and thus to some degree inhibited, and a human being, a kindred spirit, as it were, whose pursuit of freedom is as old as Plato and Kant, and as modern as the most recent reader of the novel. Such, in fact, is the vast and immutable nature of this concept that one may, as Arnold Kettle does, see the novel as one of theme rather than character. As James informs us in his Preface, the novel has as its cornerstone “the conception of a certain young lady affronting her destiny,” to which Kettle adds, “The Portrait of a Lady is a novel about destiny. . . a novel about freedom. It would not be outrageous, though it might be misleading, to call it a nineteenth-century Paradise Lost.”1 Cer­ tainly the novel does not derive its seriousness from the plot, which, as Leon Edel notes, would almost deny the theme its integrity, for it is “almost pure fairy-tale — a rich banker fairy-god father, a poor niece, a sickly renunciatory cousin, glamorous suitors. . . when the fairy-tale ceases, the story acquires melodramatic overtones. The Portrait of a Lady derives its authority not from these curious elements of its story, but from the nature of the heiress’s ‘American dream’ and her rude awakening.”2 ■ The novel is all these things, for while it cannot be denied that certain thematic philosophical concerns are projected through the character rather than plot or setting, as an individual Isabel also projects her own very hu­ man, very complex problems, of which just one is the socio-moral dilemma common to nineteenth-century married or even single women, concerning inE n g l is h St u d ie s in C a n a d a , vii, 3, F all 1981 dividual rights.3For Isabel, an intelligent young woman, theoretically knowl­ edgeable and practically naive, the conflict is intense; she is able to under­ stand the origins of her situation, and is therefore able to prescribe what she sees as a viable alternative, while having the greatest difficulty in achieving that end. In her youth Isabel has been encouraged, even trained, to ignore life’s harsh realities. She is ignorant not only, as she tells Mrs. Touchett, of money matters, but of sex, vice, or anything else in the world outside the printed page. Raised by a father whose own habit of “doing as one liked” sharply contrasted his edict prohibiting anything disagreeable from reaching the senses of his aesthetically pure daughter — and the similarity with Osmond would seem more than coincidental — Isabel “had had everything that a girl could have: kindness, admiration, flattery, bouquets, the sense of exclusion from none of the privileges of the world she lived in, abundant opportunity for dancing, the latest publications, plenty of new dresses, the London Spec­ tator, and a glimpse of contemporary aesthetics.” 4 In other words, she had been made a recluse by the very liberalism with which her father sought to free her, and to the extent that her journeys into the real world have been superficial, she has gleaned experience, such as it is, from books and an overactive imagination. The effects of such a...