Absolute Freedom: An Interdisciplinary Study

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.

• Introduction: Positive Freedom: The Absolute Within; Part. I The Idea of Freedom—Chapter One: Positive Freedom: Berlin; Chapter Two: The Reason for Freedom: Kant; Chapter Three: The Essence of Human Freedom: Fichte/Schelling; Chapter Four: The Joy of Freedom: Nietzsche/Sartre/Camus; Part II The Practice of Freedom—Chapter Five: Academic Freedom; Chapter Six: Political Freedom?; Chapter Seven: Free Speech; Chapter Eight: Artistic Freedom: Beethoven; Chapter Nine: Friendship as Freedom.

“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