This is philosophy Bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
Philosophy Bytes is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
Philosophy Bytes is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
What is it to be free?
Why is freedom valuable?
These are fairly basic questions in political philosophy.
Alan Ryan, who's divided much of his academic life between Oxford and Princeton, believes that a full understanding of freedom requires an understanding of how the concept has evolved over millennia.
Alan Ryan, welcome to philosophy Bytes.
Thank you very much.
The topic we're going to focus on is freedom and its history.
Why would we want to talk about the history of a concept of freedom at all?
One reason is that we use an enormous number of terms in politics, moral philosophy, elsewhere, which we have borrowed from the Greeks and the Romans, and some consciousness of what these words meant when they were first used and how different that is in some respects from what they mean to us today is a salutary reminder of all the things we've changed our minds about over the past two and a half thousand years.
For instance, although the Greeks fought the Persians to defend their freedom, they had no idea that you might give the vote to women.
For example, the Athenians rather prided themselves on being less stuffy than the Spartans, but at the same time, they kept their women out of sight.
Upper class women went veiled.
And you don't find Aristotle having much to say about the amount of liberty that a woman ought to enjoy.
Well, that seems to be a question about who gets freedom.
But is it a question about the concept of freedom?
Could it be that they had a similar concept of freedom, just didn't allow certain members of their society to have access to that kind of freedom?