Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper addresses the difficulties of teaching the long-term history of freedom to undergraduates born after the Cold War into an age of electronics. For years, Canadian philosopher Peter Wake and I have taught a two-semester Honors lecture seminar at St. Edward’s University entitled “The Shaping of the Modern World.” As a historian I sketch historical events from antiquity through the twentieth century and Professor Wake discusses notable philosophers spanning this time. We take as our task the exploration of the long-term development of freedom and its changing meanings – indeed a “reconsideration” (to use the special focus parlance of the 2018 New Directions Conference). The paper introduces how national, political, and individual freedom varies across centuries and countries; and we ask students to grapple with freedom presented by thinkers from Plato, Aurelius, Aquinas, and Descartes to Locke, Adam Smith, Nietzsche, DuBois, and Sartre. We have been wildly successful and surprised by student conversations inside and outside of class. Not only do they wrestle with difficulties of the historical/philosophical material itself, but students bring up contemporary issues with which they struggle such as the balance of freedom and equality, their religious beliefs in an increasingly secular age, freedom-limiting practical pressures of college costs while desiring humanistic studies/non-profit employment, and the freedom that technology seems to represent while ironically becoming its slave.