Libertas philosophandi. |
The project examines the development of the 'libertas philosophandi', which conceptually includes the freedom to speak, to write and to teach, and therefore so-called academic freedom as well. Associated developments in the field of institutional history – especially universities – will be considered as well. In fact, institutional development (or, in some cases, stagnation) spurred the debate on freedom of thought, which then in turn re-impacted those very institutions.
Up to now, scholarship has largely concentrated on the later German Enlightenment, although the debate on freedom of expression has roots going back at least as far as the early seventeenth century. Apart from a few texts from Spinoza and Wolff, the origins of the debate remain, for the most part, obscured. A debate on the problem of freedom of expression was underway as early as the German pre- and early Enlightenment, and that debate grew out of an even older discourse on freedom in general. The early Enlightenment debate on freedom of expression is usually understood in the context of the emancipation of the various academic disciplines from the dictates of theology and the scholastic tradition. Robert B. Sutton was able as early as 1953 to point out that it was not Descartes at all, who coined the phrase 'libertas philosophandi', but that it emerged much earlier – albeit in slightly varied forms – in the works of Campanella, Bruno, Foscarini, Kepler and Galileo.
All of this raises the question to what extent we can speak of a continuous development in the debate on 'libertas philosophandi' and just how such a development would look. Did these various ideas regarding freedom of thought build on one other? Is it possible to identify different developments or strings of development, and if so, what are their differences and commonalities? Is it possible to attribute different conceptions of freedom to certain philosophical 'schools', such as Thomasianism or Wolffianism? What effect did such conceptions have on the (German) Enlightenment in general and – last not least – beyond the age of Enlightenment?