ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ regards both Hobbes and Constant as supporting the negative version. Both took a favourable view of the freedom to live as one pleases. But this shared preference arose from radically different overall philosophies. Hobbes’s support for freedom as ‘the silence of the laws’ reflected his view of happiness as preference-satisfaction. Constant’s support for freedom as a sphere of absolute rights was supplemented by support for active citizenship and connected with belief in ‘perfectibility’ that (...) was itself linked to religion. These theories involve altogether different understandings of the image of an ‘area’ preserved from interference. Berlin takes over from Constant an appeal to human nature without the idea of progress that had supported it. (shrink)

Growing public interest in the dark arts, and the fact that even some philosophers have been accused of casting spells with their own writings, suggest that philosophers should not wholly neglect the topics of spells and spell-breaking. In this paper, written in honor of an effective spell-breaker in social and leadership contexts, Fr Theodore Vitali, I set out a taxonomy of spells and ways in which some philosophers may be said to cast them in a naturalistic sense. I also examine (...) ways of breaking a spell, with reference to the will and second-person relationship. I conclude with a brief observation about the desire for intellectual completeness, the root of a disordered appeal of at least some spells to their victims, suggesting an alternative scenario for a good satisfaction of this desire. (shrink)

In November 2019 the EU Whistleblower Directive came into force. Whistleblowing has been described as a human right and a freedom fundamental to democracy. But it is not always straightforward to understand concrete cases of reporting wrongdoing in terms of abstract political philosophy. This paper uses a discussion between Berlin and Skinner about what negative freedom is, as a theoretical framework to understand the struggles of a campaigning platform of trade unions and civil society organizations, in the coming about of (...) the EU Whistleblower Directive. The paper is empirically based on a document analysis of two Resolutions in the European Parliament, the European Commission’s proposal text, the approved text in the European Parliament, and messages on the listserv of the campaigning platform between February 2017 and April 2019. The paper provides insights on how whistleblowing freedom relates to public interest and autonomy. (shrink)