Akeel Bilgrami and Jonathan Cole (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231168809
- eISBN:
- 9780231538794
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231168809.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
This book discusses the conceptual issues surrounding the idea of freedom of inquiry and scrutinizes a variety of obstacles to such inquiry encountered in personal and professional experiences. This ...
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This book discusses the conceptual issues surrounding the idea of freedom of inquiry and scrutinizes a variety of obstacles to such inquiry encountered in personal and professional experiences. This discussion of threats to freedom traverses a wide disciplinary and institutional, political and economic range covering specific restrictions linked to speech codes, the interests of donors, institutional review board licensing, political pressure groups, and government policy, as well as phenomena of high generality, such as intellectual orthodoxy, in which coercion is barely visible and often self-imposed. No freedom can be taken for granted, even in the most well-functioning of formal democracies. Exposing the tendencies that undermine freedom of inquiry and their hidden sources and widespread implications is in itself an exercise in and for democracy.Less
This book discusses the conceptual issues surrounding the idea of freedom of inquiry and scrutinizes a variety of obstacles to such inquiry encountered in personal and professional experiences. This discussion of threats to freedom traverses a wide disciplinary and institutional, political and economic range covering specific restrictions linked to speech codes, the interests of donors, institutional review board licensing, political pressure groups, and government policy, as well as phenomena of high generality, such as intellectual orthodoxy, in which coercion is barely visible and often self-imposed. No freedom can be taken for granted, even in the most well-functioning of formal democracies. Exposing the tendencies that undermine freedom of inquiry and their hidden sources and widespread implications is in itself an exercise in and for democracy.
