The Sydney University Arts Association invites you to an Inaugural
Lecture...
Foucault’s Hobbes and the Concept of Liberty
by Duncan Ivison, Professor of Political Philosophy
Thursday, 8 May 2008
5:30pm for 6:00pm
Woolley Lecture Theatre, Woolley Building
Science Road, The University of Sydney
Thomas Hobbes is central to three influential accounts of political
liberty. For Isaiah Berlin, he provides an account of the pure
conception of negative liberty, said to be at the heart of much
liberal political thought. For recent republican political theory,
Hobbes stands in the way of a forgotten alternative tradition based
around the idea of freedom as ‘non-domination’. Interestingly,
Hobbes also plays an important role in the political theory of
Michael Foucault, for whom liberty is best understood as a
‘practice’ as opposed to a boundary within which individuals should
be free from interference. In this lecture Professor Ivison will
examine these three ways of thinking about political liberty. Are
we dealing with one concept or two (or three)? Today liberty is
often appealed to as perhaps the fundamental value at the heart of
liberal democracy, and yet we are increasingly asked to suspend our
suspicion of encroachments on liberty in the fight against
terrorism. Which concept (or conception ) provides us with the best
framework for making sense of what it means to be free in these
dangerous times?
Refreshments will be served prior to the lecture from 5:30pm in the
Woolley Common Room.
Duncan Ivison teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Sydney and is currently the Head of the School of
Philosophical and Historical Inquiry. He is the author of The Self
at Liberty(Cornell University Press, 1997); Postcolonial Liberalism
(Cambridge University Press, 2002); andRights (Acumen, 2008). He is
also co-editor of Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
For more information, please contact Paul Crittenden, tel 02 9799
7796 or Rosemary Huisman 02 9437 4700
A/Prof David Braddon-Mitchell,
Department of Philosophy
Main Quad A 14
University of Sydney
NSW 2006
Persistent Internet identity: http://public.xdi.org/=db-m
fax +61 2 9351 6660
phone +61 2 9351 2372
Time in Sydney, NSW:
http://www.worldtimeserver.com/current_time_in_AU-NSW.aspx
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