This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

What is it to be free? Why is freedom valuable?

These are fairly basic questions in political philosophy.

Alan Ryan, who's divided much of his academic life

between Oxford and Princeton, believes that a full understanding of freedom requires

an understanding of how the concept has evolved over millennia.

Alan Ryan, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much.

The topic we're going to focus on is freedom and its history.

Why would we want to talk about the history of a concept of freedom at all?

One reason is that we use an enormous number of terms in politics, moral philosophy elsewhere, which we have borrowed from the Greeks

and the Romans and some consciousness of what these words meant when they were first used

and how different that is in some respects from what they mean to us today

is a salutary reminder of all the things we've changed our minds about over the past 2,500

years.

For instance, although the Greeks fought the Persians to defend their freedom.

They had no idea that you might give the vote to women, for example.

The Athenians rather prided themselves on being less stuffy than the Spartans, but at the same time

they kept their women out of sight, upper-class women went veiled, and you don't find Aristotle having much to say about the amount of

...