The Spontaneity of Freedom - Summer Workshop 2025

The ERC-funded research project The Spontaneity of Freedom (SPONT) investigates a familiar but under-theorized variety of freedom. Spontaneous freedom is the freedom of unplanned, unscripted, unalienated activity. It is the freedom we feel when we set off to explore a city we have never visited before, open a sketchbook to a blank page, or quit a job to take up a new vocation.

The Spontaneity of Freedom seeks to develop a theory of the nature of spontaneous freedom and the role it does and should play in our aesthetic, moral, and political lives. Recognising the value of spontaneous freedom and its centrality to democratic progress requires overhauling widely accepted philosophical theories of the self and politics. It also provides novel insights into how best to regulate artificial intelligence and emerging digital technologies that rely on large data sets to predict and shape our choices. To do so, the Spontaneity of Freedom engages with existentialism, feminist and post-colonial theory, Marxist theory, analytic ethical and political theory, and literary and cinematic studies.

The first Summer Workshop of the project will take place in London July 4-5th.

Programme

Friday 4 July

 9.00-11.00 HOLD FOR POSSIBLE PROGRAMME ADDITION (if there is no addition to this slot, we will have a light breakfast from 10.30 and introductory remarks at 10.45)

11.00-12.15 Emily McTernan (University College London) - ‘Don’t Google me: Freedom, Spontaneity, and the Right to an Open Future’

12.15-13.30 Lunch

13.30-14:45 Pablo Fernandez Velasco (University of York) - ‘The Aesthetics of Being Lost: Spontaneous Freedom and Environmental Experience’

15.00-17.15 Karl Schafer (University of Texas) ‘The Principle of Insufficient Reason and the Possibility of Freedom’

17.15 Coffee break

17.45-18.30 Tom Whyman (University of Liverpool) - ‘Fanon, Violence, and Spontaneous Freedom’

19.00 Conference dinner (location TBD)

Saturday 5 July 

9.00 Light breakfast and coffee

9.30-10.45 Ting Fung Ho (Duke University) ‘Spontaneous Freedom in Perception: Mindfulness Beyond Categorization’

11.00-12.15 Elena Holmgren (University of British Columbia) ‘Group Flow as Spontaneous Collective Agency: A Phenomenological Account’

12.15-13.30 Lunch

13.30-14:45 Brian O’Connor (University College Dublin) - ‘Idleness as Spontaneity without Autonomy’

15.00-17.15 Eric Yang (Santa Clara University) ‘Ritual and Spontaneity’

17.15 Coffee break

17.45-18.30 Xiaochen Zhao (Independent Scholar) ‘Freedom as Ontological Spontaneity: Heidegger’s Aesthetic-Phenomenological Recasting of Kant’

19.30 Conference dinner (location TBD)

Commentators:

David Chandler (University College London)

Isabelle Herburger (Rutgers University)

Lizzy Holt (University College London)

Kirstine la Cour (University College London)

Ethan Nowak (Stanford University)

Charles Petersen (Stanford University)

Space is limited, and attendance requires registration. Please contact [email protected] to check availability and secure an invitation.