Alfino

Conference: [1]

NYRB review of Garton Ash's new book on Free Speech. [2]

Initial Notes and Ideas for work on "self and intellectual freedom"

• starting intuition (from Summer paper on Offensive Speech) that a deeper explanation for changes in attutudes toward intellectual freedom would need to take into account changes in the way we think about the self.

General Notes

• enlightenment self -- characterized by rights, autonomy, freedom of expression, but also toleration. Not defined by gender, race, orientation.
• track critiques -- disembodied, disconnected from tradition, identity, religion moves to the private sphere, (find article to do this)
• need to understand how Enlightenment distinguished the private self from the public self.
• what's new? postmodern self, digital self, and therapeutic self (research both)

• Sources:

• Taylor -- sources of the self
• Kant's odd distinction between public and private roles
• Declaration of Universal Rights of Man

• Hypotheses:

• Could it be that we are witnessing the "re-embodiment" of the self following the Enlightenment abstraction of the political subject?
• Could it be that we are changing the way we divide public and private spaces (partly because of the new possibilities of a digitally mediated self)?
• Maybe the ideals of liberty of thought that Mill articulated were never realistic. I mean he was a pretty strange guy.

Critical issues

• Assuming there is a problem in our historical relationship to freedom of conscience. Is there? Evidence from recent years: right not to be offended, right to be forgotten, challenges to academic freedom -- deplatforming, trigger warnings, reporting of faculty for perceived aggression.

• Sources of Enlightenment self (ripped from some Harvard professors' lecture series):

• Lockean theory of self -- first modern theory of personal identity
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Mill's self in On Liberty
• Hume scepticism of self
• The London Journal -- Boswell's diary 1762
• Rousseau's "Confessions of a Solitary Walker"
• Romanticism and the interiority of the self
• Franklin
• Adam Smith -- self as economic/moral agent
• Dangerous Liasons -- self as duplicitous

• Sources of Modern Self

• Cartesian Self
• Heliocentrism
• Christianity (context)

• Searches:

• Philosophers Index: self and enlightenment, enlightenmnet and lib of thought or IF, digital self

Digital Self

• uploading of self -- transhumanism
• social media -- updatin gstatus, managing a public/private self.
• old model: public vs. private
• new model: pulbic, public-private, private

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