If freedom in the sense of individual free will was false, our democracies would be little more than tyrannies, our economic institutions of ‘consumer choice’ and legal institutions of ‘crime and punishment’ would make little sense, and our actions would lose all moral relevance. We would be unable to justify praising and rewarding people for their accomplishments or punishing them for their crimes any more than we could praise the sun for rising in the morning or curse it for setting in the evening. Freedom is an essential and entrenched assumption on almost every tier of human existence and interaction.

Yet many scientists and philosophers feel that we have very good reason to doubt that we posses any freedom whatsoever, and those that don’t see freedom as an outright illusion would still hold that there is a lot more to it than the simplified ways in which it is put into practice in contemporary society. There are many as yet unresolved tensions, contradictions and problems with human freedom that remain largely ignored on the practical level, and our philosophical understanding of freedom therefore has very serious implications on what are not traditionally ‘philosophical’ spheres that have an immediate bearing on day to day life, such as law, economics, politics, and social interaction.

This talk will give a very basic outline of the debate on freedom as it has developed in philosophy, and then seek to situate my own research concerning freedom in the work of Nietzsche and Sartre within this debate.