freedom

  • 2024 Winter: Good and Freedom in Aquinas’ De Veritate

    Why do we call a thing “good”?  We have been calling things good since childhood, but, as with any conception so fundamental, it is challenging to unfold its meaning.  Given the multifarious use of this name, “good”, is there even a unity of meaning to discover?  Is it just that we call anything good merely…

    Read →

  • Falling in Love with an Easy Life

    An excerpt from the concluding pages of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Part II, recollecting time spent in the Butyrki transit prison of central Moscow. In particular, he here notes a contrast with the prisoners of his own generation—most of whom fought in the Second World War with some pride in their service for the Motherland—and the…

    Read →

  • No Freedom without Purpose

    Musings derived from recent Lyceum Institute conversations concerning language. It is an oft-stated distinction, and with good cause, that “freedom” may be said in two ways: either a kind of negative freedom, that is, a freedom belonging to self-determining agents in the absence of restraint (“freedom from”); or a kind of positive freedom, namely, the…

    Read →