On Spiritual Freedom with Martin Hägglund

On this episode of the podcast, I talk to Swedish philosopher Prof. Martin Hägglund from Yale University about his book This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free. The dominant theme of our conversation was  the meaning of freedom. Martin has a distinct notion of the demands of being free and we got into a detailed discussion about what freedom really means, how to think about it, how freedom is tied up with our social activities and just why our mortality is exactly the thing that makes us free. As well we talked about how human beings are a distinct kind of animal, a critique of posthumanism, Aristotle and living the good life, Kant’s theory of freedom, how freedom is a form of sustained activity, and also why being free is just plain hard! Enjoy! Martin Hägglund is the Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of four books – Kronofobi: Essäer om tid och ändlighet (Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude (Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002), Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford U.P., 2008), Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Harvard U.P., 2012), This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free (Pantheon, 2019) – as well as several articles, interviews and podcasts. You can find out more about Martin here at his university webpage or here on his personal webpage. You can also follow him on Twitter: @martinhaegglund   If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here.  September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T. You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Pod Bean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.