Free Four

One, two, free, four!

— Pink Floyd

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

— Origin unknown

In the United States of America we celebrated freedom on July 4th. Here are four free or not so free things.

It is useful to consider Richard McKeon’s words on freedom from his Philosophic Semantics and Philosophic Inquiry:

The question, What is freedom? is one of the recurrent ambiguous questions of philosophy which has opened up new dimensions in contemporary thought and action. It is a significant question because the initial interpretation, “freedom is the absence of external impediments to action,” focuses attention on the need to remove the ambiguities of “absence”, “external”, “impediments”, and “actions” and the growing host of ambiguities in each clarifying statement. The semantic scheme constructed from the modes of thought sets forth, thus far (see chart p.253), three sets of determinations of the question, What is freedom? What is freedom in fact or interpretation, What things are free?; What is freedom in thought or method, What property do free things share?; What is freedom in being or principle, What are the grounds of the possibility or the actuality of freedom? The question takes on a vast scope of meanings under these distinctions; and since a complete interpretation of the question makes use of all four semantic headings, the number is increased by the number of possible combinations of the four. The indefinitely large number of possible meanings is the source of the richness of philosophic inquiry, for each interpretation may be used as the hypothesis for further investigation.

Further Reading:

Click to access McK-PhilosophicSemantics&Inquiry.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_lunch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain%27t_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch

Also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Bird

Four Freedoms

The Four Freedoms

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