Recent debates about inequality have focused almost exclusively on the distribution of wealth and disparities in income, but little notice has been paid to the distribution of free time. Free time is commonly assumed to be a matter of personal preference, a good that one chooses to have more or less of. Even if there is unequal access to free time, the cause and solution are presumed to lie with the resources of income and (...) wealth. In Free Time, Julie Rose argues that these views are fundamentally mistaken. First, Rose contends that free time is a resource, like money, that one needs in order to pursue chosen ends. Further, realizing a just distribution of income and wealth is not sufficient to ensure a fair distribution of free time. Because of this, anyone concerned with distributive justice must attend to the distribution of free time. On the basis of widely held liberal principles, Rose explains why citizens are entitled to free time—time not committed to meeting life's necessities and instead available for chosen pursuits. The novel argument that the just society must guarantee all citizens their fair share of free time provides principled grounds to address critical policy choices, including work hours regulations, Sunday closing laws, public support for caregiving, and the pursuit of economic growth. Delving into an original topic that touches everyone, Free Time demonstrates why all citizens have, in the words of early labor reformers, a right to "hours for what we will.". (shrink)

Previous research suggests that there are important gender disparities in the experience of leisure, but the issue of how mothers and fathers experience free time emotionally remains overlooked. The present study addressed this lacuna using the Experience Sampling Method and survey data from the 500 Family Study. Results showed that mothers and fathers spent the same amount of time on leisure activities. However, mothers had slightly less pure free time than fathers and were more likely (...) to combine leisure with unpaid work or spend time in leisure with children. Multilevel analyses showed that pure free time was associated with increased positive affect and engagement and decreased negative affect and stress, as was the combination of free time with unpaid work and personal care. These trends did not differ by gender. Adult leisure and free time with children were also beneficial to parents’ well-being. However, the relationship between free time with children and positive affect was stronger among fathers, whereas the association between adult leisure and engagement was stronger among mothers. These results suggest that mothers may feel more anxious about being criticized by others when engaging in leisure with their children, whereas spending time with adults alone may free them from the pressures of “good mothering.”. (shrink)

Human life is finite. Given that lifetime is necessarily limited, the experience of time in any given society is a central ethical problem. If all or most of human lifetime is consumed by routine tasks then human beings are dominated by the socially determined experience of time. This article first examines time as the fundamental existential framework of human life. It then goes on to explore the determination of time today by the ruling value system that (...) underlies advanced capitalist society. It concludes that the equation ‘time is money’ rules the contemporary experience of time, and goes on to argue that this experience deprives those who live under this ruling value system of a central requirement of free human life: the experience of time as an open matrix of possibilities for action. (shrink)

Numerous studies have explored what people do in their free time, but only a few of them have tried to explain why. In Study 1 we therefore aimed to obtain a detailed picture of the ways in which students spend their free time, but also we wanted to investigate their motivation for engaging in a specific activity that they consider to be their favourite. We found that the highest percentage of 585 students, who participated in Study (...) 1, spend most of their free time on social interactions, reading and leisure with family. However, although they did not spend much time on physical activities, participants reported them as their favourite ones. An analysis of variance showed no differences in hedonic motives for free time activities, while eudaimonic motives did differ. In Study 2, we investigated intrinsic motivation for physical exercise on a new sample of 202 students, and found that recreational athletes have significantly higher intrinsic motivation compared to physically less active participants. (shrink)

Demands for free time protections are often justified with appeal to a concern for individuals' welfare. The idea is that people would enjoy greater levels of welfare if they had more access to free time. This article shows that the currently most sophisticated version of the welfare argument is inconclusive. It then shows how this argument can be modified and extended to become conclusive. The main claim is that policymakers have a decisive welfare-based reason to implement (...) free time protections that go even further than those already in place in countries that are known for their good work–life balance. (shrink)

In this paper, I use the framework developed by Julie Rose in Free Time to offer an initial analysis of another under-theorized resource that liberal egalitarian states might owe their citizens: that is, the sense of moral of entitlement to make use of their basic liberties. First, I suggest that this sense of moral entitlement, like free time, might be necessary for the effective use of those basic liberties. Next, I suggest that this sense of moral (...) entitlement (again, like free time) might be the kind of all-purpose good that satisfies publicity and feasibility criteria. Together, this suggests that a sense of moral entitlement to make use of basic liberties is the kind of resource that is appropriate for distribution by a liberal egalitarian state, and that such states indeed owe their citizens. (shrink)

To us today, it seems intuitive that an ideal society would secure for its citizens some time for leisure that is, some time to do “whatever they want” after having attended to their various responsibilities and natural needs. But, in this essay, I argue that—in 19th century social philosophy—the status of leisure (Muße) in an ideal society was actually surprisingly controversial: whereas J.G. Fichte makes a strong case for leisure as part of an ideal society (going even so (...) far as considering it its central good), G.W.F. Hegel implicitly argues against this idea. For him, leisure is a crook that we only need as long as the social conditions are not sufficiently ideal—whereas a truly rational society would create a new type of work that subsumes the benefits of leisure into work itself. In this essay, I reconstruct this largely forgotten disagreement and argue that although both positions contain an important overstatement, each includes an important lesson for the contemporary debate on leisure and society. (shrink)

Retirement is often viewed as a reward for a working life. While many have reason to want a work-free retirement, not everyone does. Should working retirees have to give up their retirement pension and, consequently, their status as retirees? The answer, I argue, boils down to whether we conceive of retirement as free time (need-free) or as leisure (work-free). In this article, I put forward a liberal case in favour of free time, despite (...) whether our liberalism leans towards perfectionism or neutralism, with social primary goods being a case in point. Applying this case for free time to retirement yields two significant policy implications. First, it demands “free synchronic combination” – that retirees may use their retirement pensions however they see fit, including to work. Second, it also yields “free diachronic combination” – that, within limits, individuals have discretionary control over how to combine retirement and work across time – thus challenging the idea that retirement should be available only in old age and not earlier in life. So far, the literature on free time focused only on narrow temporal units, such as hours and days, but there is much to gain by extending the concept into retirement. (shrink)

U tekstu se polazi od problemske konstatacije prema kojoj je kapitalizam kao način života toliko postao dominantan da sustavno prožima cjelokupno vrijeme pojedinca, i radno i slobodno vrijeme. Dakle, sustav je čovjekovo vrijeme u totalu stavio u zavjetrinu ekonomije. I njime upravlja i vlada .Dalje se u tekstu postavlja pitanje koliko će još proći »vremena da se deblokiraju potencijali čovjekove prirode zapreteni u ekonomiji slobodnog vremena« . U suprotnom »svaki napredak u proizvodnji s pasivnom proizvođačkom klasom može samo pospješiti izdvajanje (...) i jačanje nove gornje klase« . Tako nastaje dublja problemska situacija u kojoj se pojedinci pretvaraju u pasivne grupe i društvene zajednice i time cijelo društvo čine pasivnim i osrednjim.Rješenje se, prema Supeku, nalazi u izoštravanju »samosvijesti građanina« kojom bi se uspješno otklanjala pasivnost i nekritičnost čovjekove svijesti. Cijeli bi se taj proces mogao razvijati iz temeljne »usamljenosti« građanina, koja pretpostavlja sigurnu distancu od tržišnog konzumerizma. Samosvijest nastala usred vlastite usamljenosti, tj. usred kritičkog odmaka od svakodnevice, bila bi osnažena i kritički otvorena prema sebi i prema sredini u kojoj živi. I tada bi mogla »djelovati kako hoće«, a ne kako je diktirano odozgor.Ta temeljna i kritički distancirana usamljenost građanina razumijevala bi se kao kvalitetno novo iskustvo vremena u neovisnom i autonomnom prostoru slobode u kojem se konačno može ostvariti vlastito slobodno vrijeme bitno drugačije od pasivne besposlice.The initial concept of this text is the problem conclusion which claims that capitalism as a way of life has become so dominant that it systematically permeates the individual’s complete time, their working hours as well as their free time. In other words, man’s free time has been overtaken by the system and completely subjected to economy. And it is run by the government .Further in the text a question arises: How long “will it take to deliver the potentials of human nature which are entwined in the economy of free time” . Otherwise “every progress that is made in production using passive production classes can only help facilitate the separation and strengthening of the new upper class” . This leads to a deeper problem situation in which individuals are being turned into passive groups and social communities, which makes the entire society passive and mediocre.According to Supek, the solution is in sharpening the “citizens’ self-consciousness”, which could bring success in removing passivity and non-critical human consciousness. The entire process could be developed from the foundational “loneliness” of the citizen, which implies a safe distance from market consumerism. Self-consciousness, caused by personal loneliness, i.e., critical detachment from everyday life, would be strengthened and critically open toward itself and the society in which the person lives. And then it would be able to “do as it pleased”, and not as it has been ordered from a higher instance.This foundational and critically detached loneliness of citizens could be understood as a good and fresh experience of time in an independent and autonomous space of freedom, where a person could finally be able to achieve their own free time in a way that is largely different than just mere passive doing nothing. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to contribute to defences of working time policies by attempting to meet an objection that comes from those who condemn these measures on the alleged grounds that they reduce economic output. What is more, as I emphasize throughout, it is possible to rebut such a concern in a fashion that is consistent with the demands of liberal anti-perfectionism. In itself, this is a philosophically striking and politically significant result. However, beyond this, much of (...) the value of my discussion lies in the details of how to meet the relevant objection, and perhaps especially in my novel liberal defence of the ideal of the stationary state. (shrink)

The building of itself is an act moved from the hopes and dreams of becoming. Dreams project a future that can be, and hope is the force required to achieve them. The life project is an exercise in awareness that begins with imagining what you want to be and be aware of the relationship with the world. Leisure is lived from internal motivations and is auto-condicionated to seek the opportunities realization of dreams. Education for Leisure must recover the ideals of (...) life, learning to live the leisure, and spark the imagination for the realization of dreams. This paper presents the research results on what you want to be and how to realize them in their free time; this is a descriptive case study investigation with the phenomenological method. (shrink)

Recent theoretical and empirical studies tend to highlight the prominent role that time plays in society, in a context of changing rhythms of work, the ageing of the European population and changing family structures. In this contribution I analyse the way time is used for leisure in Romania and situate it in the European context. I highlight the time use for creative and leisure activities in respect with gender, following the hypothesis that leisure is an important dimension (...) of gender gap. It was used factor analysis to observe the differences existing in time use for leisure in respect with occupational status, marital status and education. (shrink)

In this article I address education beyond individualism, elitism and instrumentalism and instead understand education as central for a democratic way of life. I discuss the role of education in the making of democratic forms of life in the university, in the school as well as in other contexts outside institutions. I argue for the importance of defending the “free time” of the university and school against a “time of production” as a defining characteristic of university and (...) school. I will show how a time of production undermine the very possibility of education, and which therefore also tends to negate pluralist democracy. (shrink)

At the centre of this paper is the distinction between a politicised school, and school as a political space. We take note of Papastephanou’s (2005) warning not to make education the passive receiver of political thought. Based on Masschelein and Simons (2013), we criticise the tendency to conceptualise democratic education, particularly agonistic democratic education, as the implementation of political theory in a school context. We draw on their idea of school as free time, to argue that democratic education (...) should envision the classroom as political in itself, that is, as a place for negotiation and renewal, where the ends are not predetermined. When school becomes a place to implement political theory, when it is politicised, then it is stripped of its own political potency. In scholastic terms, it is tamed. In this paper, a fusion of Mouffean agonism with Masschelein and Simons’ conception of school, works to form an understanding of agonistic democratic education as a time and place for the formation of community and for the negotiation of identity, under protection from the non-accountability (Arendt 1961) that characterises scholastic practice. (shrink)

In 1962, the philosopher Richard Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that human beings have no control over the future. David Foster Wallace not only took issue with Taylor's method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but also noted a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor's argument. _Fate, Time, and Language_ presents Wallace's brilliant critique of Taylor's work. Written long before the publication of his fiction and essays, Wallace's (...) thesis reveals his great skepticism of abstract thinking made to function as a negation of something more genuine and real. He was especially suspicious of certain paradigms of thought-the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever gimmickry of postmodernism-that abandoned "the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community." As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor, we witness the developing perspective of this major novelist, along with his struggle to establish solid logical ground for his convictions. This volume, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, reproduces Taylor's original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace. James Ryerson's introduction connects Wallace's early philosophical work to the themes and explorations of his later fiction, and Jay Garfield supplies a critical biographical epilogue. (shrink)

In this paper I defend two conclusions: that time travel journeys to the past are not undertaken freely and, more generally, that nobody is free between the earliest arrival time and the latest departure time of a time travel journey to the past. Time travel to the past destroys freedom on a global scale.

Clarifies the central elements of the "stuckness" feeling in the traditional framework for free will and determinism in psychology, based on the inherent dependence on context and the assumed need of free will to be independent of context. These central elements are examined from the relatively overlooked perspective of time. A large part of the stuckness is revealed to stem from the linear assumption of time, rather than the linear nature of causality, as usually assumed. Suggestions (...) are offered for overcoming this overlooked perspective to overcome the stuckness. Alternative assumptions of time are shown to offer a fresh framework for resolving the free will/determinism problem. It is suggested that nonlinear approaches to time offer several advantages in the framing of the issues, including the integration of possibility and the past, without time and causality being sacrificed in the process. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In this chapter I articulate the threat that time travel to the past allegedly poses to the free will of the time traveler, and I argue that on the traditional way of thinking about free will, the incompatibilist about time travel and free will wins the day. However, a residual worry about the incompatibilist view points the way toward a novel way of thinking about free will, one that I tentatively explore toward the (...) end of the chapter. (shrink)

In spite of the inherent oddity of the notion that the human soul might be constrained by its own lawlike will, it is not likely that the arguments I have advanced against that notion will be entirely convincing to committed incompatibilists. I should expect that the point of view will soon be reaffirmed that, in some sense, human beings, because of the lawlike behavior of their wills, cannot be free. It is to this puzzling intractability of the ‘free-will’ (...) debate that I turn in this paper. By my own arguments (See note \5/ on R. Pendleton) it is logically possible that human beings might be construed as ‘constrained’ by their own wills. All we have to do is define the constrained human self so as to exclude the willing faculty. But does it make any sense to construe the human self in such a way? Can the human will itself be conceived as an ‘alienable’ property capable of constraining, in a meaningful way, the human self? (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Some may be of the opinion that one event can begin before another only by virtue of the existence of some event (a “witness”) which wholly precedes the other and does not wholly precede the one (and similarly for “ends before” and “does not abut”). Those would prefer $\mathbb{F}$ 0 to $\mathbb{F}$ as a model for observers' apprehensions of events. Since G is a functor from $\mathbb{M}$ to $\mathbb{F}$ 0, the current construction (restricted to $\mathbb{F}$ 0) remains applicable.This work supports (...) a claim that the psychologically fundamental temporal relationships are “wholly precedes”, “begins before”, “ends before” and “abuts”. But only in a very weak sense. Any other set of relationships which is interdefinable with this one, using only quantifier-free formulas in the definitions, could be used to define a category $\mathbb{F}$ ′ which is indistinguishable from $\mathbb{F}$ (because the same functions preserve and reflect the new relationships). This work equally supports the claim that those relationships are the psychologically fundamental ones, or the claim that it is just “wholly precedes” which is fundamental, and that we perceive “begins before” just by virtue of witnesses. But it refutes the claim that only “wholly precedes” is fundamental, and that we understand “begins before” only because we understand time as a linear ordering. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In 1962, the philosopher Richard Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that human beings have no control over the future. David Foster Wallace not only took issue with Taylor's method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but also noted a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor's argument. _Fate, Time, and Language_ presents Wallace's brilliant critique of Taylor's work. Written long before the publication of his fiction and essays, Wallace's (...) thesis reveals his great skepticism of abstract thinking made to function as a negation of something more genuine and real. He was especially suspicious of certain paradigms of thought-the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever gimmickry of postmodernism-that abandoned "the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community." As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor, we witness the developing perspective of this major novelist, along with his struggle to establish solid logical ground for his convictions. This volume, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, reproduces Taylor's original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace. James Ryerson's introduction connects Wallace's early philosophical work to the themes and explorations of his later fiction, and Jay Garfield supplies a critical biographical epilogue. (shrink)

Physics has often undermined the notion of free will, and philosophers have been concerned about this for many reasons. One is that freedom seems to be a necessary condition for moral responsibility. This chapter explains how special theory of relativity (STR) leads to the idea that there is no flow of time. It analyzes several proposals that reintroduce a classical view of time without violating relativity. The chapter suggests two ways in which the philosophy of science can (...) add some helpful perspective to the debate. It discusses how Einstein took gravity to be a geometric property of space time rather than a force and that general theory of relativity (GTR) conflicts with the Standard Model of particle physics. The chapter explains that there are several possible moves one might make in order to preserve a classical view of time. (shrink)

S razvitkom kapitalizma sve više se govori i piše o slobodnom vremenu, a njegovim komercijaliziranjem razvile su se unosne gospodarske grane: »industrija zabave«, turizam i sport. Kapital, međutim, slobodno vrijeme najprije prepoznaje kao vrijeme slobodno od rada, tj. kao besposlicu, a tek u najnovije doba – kada je naučio kako od njega profitirati – i kao vrijeme slobodno za učenje i stvaralaštvo, tj. kao dokolicu.Razlika između besposlice koja teži potrošnji i dokolice koja se ispunjava samodjelatnošću mnogima je još nejasna. A (...) tu se razliku često i namjerno prikriva da bi se slobodno vrijeme, s jedne strane, lakše komercijaliziralo i da bi se, s druge strane, poništio njegov društveno revolucionarni naboj. Tome služi i prikrivanje razlike između rada i samodjelatnosti, pa se postavlja pitanje: jesu li sportska natjecanja igra ili rad? Ili za primjer: igra li se nogomet, ili se nogomet radi?With the development of capitalism free time is more and more the subject of spoken and written word, and with its commercialization three profitable economy branches have developed: “entertainment industry”, tourism and sport. Capital, meanwhile, identifies free time as time free from work, or idleness, and only in recent time – when it learnt to make profit out of free time- time free for learning and creativeness, or as leisure.Difference between idleness, which leans towards consumption, and leisure, which fulfils itself with self-activity, to a great many is still obscure. And that difference is often and purposely concealed meaning to, on one side, commercialize free time more easily and, on the other hand, to quash its socially revolutionary surge. For that purpose is also the concealing of difference between work and self-activity, and the question is asked: are the sport competitions a game or a work? Or precisely: “Does one play football, or does one do football?”. (shrink)