Tag: Freedom

• March 27, 2014

  Philosophical Portraiture: ‘The Inner Citadel’

    Two faces of the ‘Inner Citadel,’ a philosophical portrait drawn in charcoal by Aleksandra Marcella Lauro. (The reference is to Pierre Hadot’s book on Marcus Aurelius.)
• December 19, 2012

  On 3 moments of freedom

  Let’s examine a few different conceptions of freedom in hopes of arriving, in the end, at where we began. In his famous essay, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” the contemporary philosopher Harry Frankfurt states, “According to one familiar philosophical tradition, being free is fundamentally a matter of doing what one wants…
• January 21, 2012

  Against the fantasy of something for nothing

  (Beyond my bedroom window: the snow comes down, the pigeons sit askant, at odd angles, one here, another there as if playing with me.) — (The birds, unseen, are singing amid the gently falling snow. Pure sprightly delight.) — We have inherited a misguided public philosophy concerning the desirability of “free things.” The fantasy that,…