Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 22:36:34 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: freedom


Hi Ruth, 

Good. I take it, then, that when we all jump ahead, we will entertain
the possibility (as befits good dialecticians) that there might be some
dynamic *interrelation* between freedom as the absenting of constraints
and freedom as eudaimonia which negates the absenting of constraints as
your *per se* and your *philosophically impoverished* (lingering
legacies of the old analytical either/or, perhaps?)


Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca> writes
>Mervyn wrote:
>>Without getting into complexities, if you are hemmed in by constraints, are
>you >not unfree? And if a constraint is removed, aren't you more free (cp)?
>
>I have reservations about this kind of talk.  Of course, the paradigm
>version is in Hobbes: "Liberty, or freedom, signifieth, properly, the
>absence of opposition."  (Lev., ch. 21)  But even a liberal like Locke feels
>compelled to note that "that ill deserves the Name of Confinement which
>hedges us in only from Bogs and Precipices." (2nd Treatise, paragraph 57) --
>and this is miles still from someone like Rousseau, even.
>
>Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't in the end look to Rousseau to learn a lot
>about freedom, but I do think that freedom conceived as -- or even in terms
>of -- the absence of constraint, is a philosophically impoverished
>conception.  Eudaimonia is by far the more interesting concept.  What it has
>or has not to do with the absence of constraint *per se*, is an important
>question.  I know that I'm jumping ahead in saying this now, but I do hope
>that we will be able to work through this when we get to the later sections
>of the book.     
>
>r.
>
>R.
>
>
>
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-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
Editor, 'Alethia'
Newsletter of the International Association for Critical Realism
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Email: mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk


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