This project 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.

More broadly, the Spontaneity of Freedom aims to consolidate an emerging philosophical renaissance of non-rationalist theories of the self, building connections among philosophical approaches that emphasis the prospective value of limitations on the human ability to rationally plan and control our actions. Simultaneously, the Spontaneity of Freedom aims to model and enact spontaneous freedom in a small way by promoting and facilitating philosophical research that develops in an exploratory, unscripted way.