Are we free or subject to fate? How do freedom and necessity correlate? How is our personal freedom limited and can it be collective, for example, rather than individual? Philosophers have been tackling these issues for 2500 years.
The talk will briefly outline the key landmarks in this continuous discourse. Club members will then discuss whether philosophy can be viewed as a means of internal liberation and how it helps us to comprehend what freedom generally is. The session is based around philosophic texts written in captivity, from Plato’s classic dialogues about the final days of Socrates, through to Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy and Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.