Absolute Freedom: An Interdisciplinary Study

Description

At a time when the term "freedom" is loosely-and dangerously-bandied about, this work makes the important distinction between positive and negative freedom, and examines the various "zones" of positive freedom (art, religion, academia, politics, speech, etc.)

Paul Gordon is a professor of comparative literature/humanities at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He received his PhD in comparative literature from Yale. Previous books: The Critical Double; Rapturous Superabundance: Tragedy after Nietzsche; Dial 'M' for Mother: A Freudian Hitchcock; Art as the Absolute; Synaesthetics.

"Paul Gordon has provided a wonderfully broad and deep exploration of the 'highest sense' of freedom. Ranging from Plato to Thelma and Louise, via Nietzsche and Isaiah Berlin, Gordon creates an engaging web of cross-associations revealing freedom, in its most positive sense, as a potential condition of transcendence, a 'field' of creative energy" -Stephen Barker, PhD, UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts, USA "After his groundbreaking Art and the Absolute, which explored art as a privileged domain of freedom from the conceptual, Paul Gordon's Positive Freedom turns to freedom itself: freedom not merely from, but for. In a dizzying and dire series of reflections on freedom from Kant to Camus, from free speech to friendship, Gordon posits positive freedom as the very foundation of our liberal democracy" -Dr Matthew Gumpert, Department of Western Languages and Literature, Bogazici University, Turkey. "In subject and mode, Gordon's Positive Freedom: An Interdisciplinary Study is a vindication of comparative work-in all its creativity and potential originality-as a route to absolute freedom: that domain where thinking about thinking becomes possible" -Dr Chiara Alfano, Assistant Professor in English and Education, New College of the Humanities at Northeastern, UK. "Paul Gordon's Positive Freedom makes a timely philosophical intervention in our present-day political and epidemiological controversies about freedom. Gordon reveals the limitations of defining freedom simply negatively, as immunity from restrictions. And he compellingly posits what he calls positive freedom as the pursuit or experience of a higher absolute" -Thomas Albrecht, Professor of English, Tulane University, USA.