Freedom and Rationality
Philosophy's great unsolved questions
Description
In the late 1980s, a group of philosophers set about doing the thing academics do when they want to honor one of their own: they assembled a book. The person they were honoring was John Watkins, a philosopher at the London School of Economics who had spent his career worrying at two words most people use without a second thought — freedom and rationality. The result, a collection of essays edited by F. D'Agostino and I. C. Jarvie under the title Freedom and Rationality, gathered friends, colleagues and former students to write on the themes that had animated Watkins's own work. A festschrift, in the trade. A gift made of arguments.
The choice of themes was not decorative. Watkins had been one of Karl Popper's closest associates at the LSE, and he inherited from that world a particular conviction: that the questions of how we know things, how we reason, and how we act freely are not separate departments but one tangled inquiry. A theory of science that ignores human choice is incomplete. A theory of freedom that ignores how minds actually reason is empty. The contributors to the volume — figures like Watkins's peers in the philosophy of science and political thought — took up pieces of that tangle, each pulling at a different thread.
What makes such a book worth opening decades later is not that it settles anything. It doesn't. It is that it shows a community of thinkers circling two of philosophy's oldest and least cooperative problems, and refusing to pretend they are smaller than they are. Freedom and rationality have been argued over since antiquity, and here is a room full of people, near the end of the twentieth century, still finding them genuinely hard.
The question we’re asking : Why do freedom and rationality remain unsettled after millennia of philosophy, and what did Watkins's circle add to the argument?What we’ll see : How a book written to honor one philosopher becomes a map of the questions he could never close.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — A festschrift for a stubborn rationalist
John Watkins spent almost his entire academic life at the London School of Economics, where he arrived after the Second World War and eventually succeeded Karl Popper as professor of philosophy. He was, by all accounts, a combative and precise thinker — the kind who would rather lose an argument cleanly than win one by fudging it. That temperament matters, because the book made in his honor took its shape from it. A festschrift is a genre with its own risks: contributors can drift into flattery, or into essays that have nothing to do with the person being celebrated. Freedom and Rationality mostly avoids both, because Watkins's own concerns were sharp enough to keep the contributors on task.
The volume's editors, F. D'Agostino and I. C. Jarvie, organized the essays around the themes Watkins had made his own rather than around his biography. This is a meaningful decision. It means the book is less a portrait of a man than a snapshot of a research program — the cluster of problems that a particular school of thought considered urgent. Watkins had written on the philosophy of science, on decision-making under uncertainty, on the foundations of statistical inference, and on the political question of how free individuals combine into a society. The contributors fanned out across that territory.
02Chapter 2 — The problem Popper handed his students
To understand what the volume is arguing about, it helps to see the problem Watkins and his colleagues inherited. Popper had made his name with a deceptively simple claim about science: theories can never be proved true, only tested and, if they fail, falsified. A good scientific theory is one that sticks its neck out — that forbids certain observations, and can therefore be shown wrong. This turned the traditional picture of knowledge inside out. Instead of piling up confirmations, science advances by bold guesses and ruthless attempts to knock them down.
That picture solves one problem and opens another. If we never actually prove anything, on what basis do we ever accept a theory, or act on it? A scientist has to choose which theory to work with, which experiment to run, which claim to trust enough to build on. A person has to decide how to live without waiting for certainty that will never come. Rationality, on the Popperian account, cannot mean holding only beliefs you can prove — because you can prove none. It has to mean something more like reasoning well under permanent uncertainty. Several essays in the volume worry precisely at this seam: what does it mean to be rational when justification, in the old strong sense, is off the table?
03Chapter 3 — Freedom, when the self keeps changing
Freedom is the word that seems obvious until you try to say what it protects. The tradition Watkins worked in leaned toward what philosophers call negative liberty — freedom as the absence of interference, the space in which a person can act without being coerced. It is a modest, defensible idea, and it fits naturally with a suspicion of grand plans imposed from above. Popper's political writing had made that suspicion famous: he distrusted any theory that claimed to know the shape of the good society in advance, because such theories tend to justify overriding the actual choices of actual people.
But the essays in the collection show how quickly the modest idea gets complicated. If freedom is the space to pursue one's aims, what happens when the aims themselves are formed by forces the person did not choose — upbringing, language, the society that shaped the wanting? And what happens over time, as people change their minds, revise their values, become someone their earlier self would not recognize? A framework built around individual choice has to reckon with the awkward fact that the chooser is not a fixed point. The self doing the deciding is itself a moving target, remade by the very decisions it makes.
04Chapter 4 — Why the questions refuse to close
Step back from the individual essays and a larger picture comes into focus — one about what philosophy is actually doing when it takes on words this big. Freedom and Rationality does not present freedom and rationality as puzzles awaiting a final solution. It presents them as the sort of question that a serious tradition keeps alive precisely by refusing to declare victory. And that refusal is not a failure of nerve. It is the method itself. A field that treats its central concepts as permanently open is a field that has understood how hard those concepts are.
This is where the shape of the book matters as much as its content. A festschrift is, structurally, a conversation — many voices, gathered around a common preoccupation, not agreeing so much as pressing on the same problem from different angles. That form mirrors the Popperian conviction the contributors share: that knowledge grows through criticism, that no single mind owns the truth, that the best you can do is put your conjecture into the room and let others test it. The book performs the very thing it argues. It is rationality and freedom enacted, not just described — a community reasoning in public, each free to dissent.
05Conclusion
John Watkins died in 1999, a few years after the book bearing his preoccupations appeared. The volume his colleagues assembled did what the best festschrifts do: it returned his own concerns to him, refracted through other minds, argued over rather than agreed with. Freedom and rationality remained, at the last page, exactly as unsettled as they were at the first — but unsettled in a more interesting, better-mapped way. The contributors had not closed the questions. They had shown, in careful detail, why the questions stay open, and why an open question can be more valuable than a premature answer.
Related books
