This session invites presenters to reflect on whether possibilities for freedom of thought--or freedoms in the plural--may have shifted in the wake of the Enlightenment. For the Enlightenment tradition, thought lays claim to or even names its own kind of freedom, in the sense that any real thinking worthy of the name necessarily takes flight by freeing itself from the strictures of tradition ("dogma," "superstition," "traditional authority," etc.). If there can be no thinking without freedom, by the same token there can be no real freedom without thought; a thoughtless freedom would be indistinguishable from unfreedom.

The double question of freedom and thought seems to acquire a new urgency today in contexts such as the global rise of authoritarian political forms, new technologies of surveillance and control, the rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence, and the relentless destruction of the humanities and liberal arts in the contemporary university. While contemporary forces and conflicts perhaps underscore both the importance and the precarious nature of this intertwined relationship between thinking and freedom, this session also seeks to open conversations with non-contemporary or historical reflections on the question of freedom and thought as it has posed itself to philosophy, political thought, literary studies, and related fields of inquiry over the past three centuries. Possible topics include censorship, repression, global capitalism, technics, and academic (un)freedom.