The instinct of freedom

Noam Chomsky enjoys great fame in the Arab world, as a writer working to expose the foreign policies of the United States of America and its allies, and as a linguist who established the theory of generative grammar. But Chomsky is also a philosopher of the first order; he wrote on political philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of mathematics, logic, the mind-body problem, and other traditional philosophical topics. We would like to present the Arab reader with a part of Chomsky's philosophical work, due to its philosophical importance, on one hand, and its direct connection to our current and urgent questions about issues of freedom, liberation, cultural particularities, and the role of intellectuals in the struggle for liberation, among other topics, on the other hand. The translated articles here include topics in epistemology, the foundations of science, rationality, the role of intellectuals, and the relationship between philosophical work and political activity, all united by one main theme: freedom.