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Freedom
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What is Freedom?

Freedom is one of the most foundational concepts in political and governmental thought, making it a natural subject for courses in political science, civics, history, and social theory. Its academic interest lies in the tension between individual liberty and collective authority — between what a person claims as a right and what a society or government chooses to regulate or restrict. Works like Martin Luther's On the Freedom of a Christian and narratives like Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl show that freedom carries distinct meanings across religious, legal, and personal contexts, and those layered meanings give the topic lasting intellectual depth.

Student papers on this topic approach freedom from strikingly varied angles. Some engage in literary and textual analysis, examining how freedom is pursued or denied in specific narratives, including those tied to slavery and immigrant experience. Others take a policy or argumentative stance, debating issues like school uniform requirements as questions of individual rights versus institutional control. Historical case studies, such as the My Lai massacre, frame freedom in terms of governmental power and accountability, while more personal or creative pieces explore freedom as an abstract value tied to identity, adolescence, and social belonging.

A strong essay on freedom requires a precise, focused thesis rather than a broad claim that "freedom is important." The most persuasive papers define which form of freedom they are analyzing — civil, personal, political, or spiritual — and anchor arguments in specific evidence such as legal frameworks, primary texts, or documented historical events. The most common pitfall is treating freedom as self-evidently positive without examining the competing rights or societal structures that complicate it.

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Paper Doctorate

Manny Pacquiao's endurance and Filipino national identity in Pacific Storm

Trinidad's Pacific Storm: Dispatches on Pacquiao of the Philippines begins with an epigraph from Ernest Hemingway, stating that "courage above all is the first quality of a warrior" (p.

Paper Undergraduate

Descartes, Ryle, and Armstrong on mind-body dualism

Descartes argued that that all humans had both a body and mind, and that the mind was eternal while the body was subject to physical and material laws. The universe was divided between the mind and matter, and the physical world could be explained by mathematical and scientific laws. Hobbes, Locke and other political and philosophical theorists of the 17th Century were also influenced by the new scientific thought of Descartes, Galileo and William Harvey to one degree or another, and had to incorporate them into philosophy (Ryle, p. 251). Ryle denied that any "ghost in the machine" existed, of that the immortal soul somehow operated the physical body. He admitted that explaining the link between bodies and minds was very difficult, although behaviorists had come to understand that expressions indicate moods and emotions, while vision, hearing and motion are all based on sensory inputs being received by the mind, but no one could actually measure and observe mental processes at the time Ryle was writing in 1949 (Ryle, p. 252).

Essay Doctorate

Future computing devices and personal technology adoption trends

The idea of stopping the sharing of creative content and information online is like stopping a moving train by standing on the tracks and waving a white handkerchief. Too many forces are in play and the stakeholder group is very large for any simple solutions to be generated. At issue is property law and intellectual property. The financial investments in the creation of music, videos, academic materials, and literature can be enormous. Obviously, copyright laws and intellectual property laws were created to protect those investments. Yet, there appears to be a wholesale disregard for property rights that extend to anything that is in digital format.

Paper High School

Sarah Bakewell's "How to Live" and Montaigne's philosophy

I would say to anyone who was depressed, confused or in despair about the condition of the world today that Montaigne lived in a world like ours, and probably even worse, and that most people in his time believed that The End was near. This was also the era that Nostradamus was writing and making his famous predictions, and he was only the best known of the astrologers and prophets who were running around at that time. He has been most beneficial to those who expect the world to end in December 2012, although he did not actually make such a specific prediction anywhere as far as I know.

Paper Undergraduate

Cannibalism and Confucianism in Lu Xun's "A Madman's Diary"

This is a paper that examines two Lu Xun's stories; "A Madman's Diary and New Year's Sacrifice." The two stories are representative of the situation in China in the early to mid-1900s. They present a strong motif of tradition vs. modernity where modernity is represented by the May Fourth Movement.

Paper Doctorate

Understanding Africa's underdevelopment: geography, colonialism, and corruption

This paper talks about the continent of Africa. Despite many valuable natural resources available, the continent has not progressed. It is still very underdeveloped. Part of the reason for this is geography. Another important factor is colonialism which forever changed the way the people of Africa ruled, lived, and continued in their culture.

Paper Undergraduate

Television and film as cultural mirrors in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s

As technology and sheer presence of television and film grew in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's, their ability to reflect and influence American culture also increased. The tumultuous 1970's and that decade's rise of…

Business ethics and slavery in precapitalist America

The American Revolution was kindled by a growing dissatisfaction with the way colonial merchants were being treated by the English ruling class (Collins, 2011). In response to the Ottoman Empire's capture of…

Research Paper Undergraduate

Apartheid legislation and racial segregation in South Africa

¶ … South Africa under the apartheid system

Paper Doctorate

Personal identity and the Genie's protean nature in Aladdin

This is a personal essay selecting a Disney character and offering 3 reasons why the author identifies with that character. The chosen character is The Genie from Disney's 1992 animated film Aladdin. The reasons for identifying with the Genie are given as his protean nature, his tremendous power, and his limitations. The conclusion explains the Genie as a metaphor for the human imagination, with its tremendous power in overcoming limitations.

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