Freeman has taught for a number of academic institutions, including the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and Pembroke College, Cambridge.
He currently lectures at Pembroke College, Cambridge, for its International Programmes Department’s Pembroke/King’s Programme, where he gives two courses of lectures:
His teaching has included topics in ethics, political thought, and the history of philosophy (e.g. Plato’s Meno, Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and Mill’s On Liberty and On the Subjection of Women). His focus, however, is in aesthetics, for which he gave a course of lectures on Beauty, Art and Aesthetic Experience, for the Cambridge Philosophy Faculty’s third-year paper on Aesthetics for a number of years. He has also supervised undergraduate research projects on a range of topics, including the following:
- “Theatre and Functions”
(philosophy of theatre and Searle’s social ontology) - “Understanding Olympia: Engaging with the visual arts”
(painting and aesthetic experience) - “Public Morality”
(morality and philosophy of law, especially George’s Making Men Moral) - “The Ethics of Cooperation: Responding to each other’s practical reasons”
(Korsgaard’s ethics) - “Pleasure and the Good Life: Hedonism and Aristotle”
(Aristotle’s ethics) - “Motivation to be Good”
(Nagel’s moral psychology) - “Philosophy of Emotion and Conceptual Analysis”
(contemporary analytic philosophy of emotion) - “Parfit’s Non-Identity Problem and Obligations to Future Generations”
(Parfit’s ethics) - “Anthropology and Ethics”
(philosophical anthropology, Korsgaard, Kant, Kelsey’s Eccentric Existence) - “Survival: Parfit on Personal Identity”
(Parfit’s philosophy of mind) - “Contemporary English Conservatism: the case of Roger Scruton”
(Scruton’s political thought) - “The Ethics of Desire and Suffering”
(Schopenhauer’s ethics) - “Aesthetic Realism”
(aesthetic properties in contemporary analytic aesthetics) - “Rhetoric and Love in Plato’s Phaedrus”
(Plato’s rhetoric)
Teaching room at Magdalene College, Cambridge