hi all 
i have just started my first course and found this site, hopefully can get some help and guidance and hear some of your opinions.
at the moment i am struggling to comprehend what positive and negative freedom is, i do hope i can get my head round it, 
get used to my presence on here everyoneā¦I NEED U ALL!!! 
Welcome to ILP! I hope I can help you.
Negitive freedom is freedom that results in harm to the community. Im not to sure how to describe positive freedom other than freedom that doesnt result in harm to the commuinity.
Positive freedom is that stuff they always tell ya about. now you get to make your own choices. you have no master. youāre incontrol of your own life. Negative freedom is stuff they donāt mention often. āyouāre on your own pal! you have no place left. Now you can be BORED. follow after that unnatainable goal ya schmuck!ā for negative freedom look towards america. a bunch of ants without a queen, colony, or a place to be.
thanks for making me feel welcome guys and for shedding light on things for me. 
look forward to more of the same mutually
Welcome to the forum VictoriaM. Nigel Warburton had an excellent discussion on positive and negative freedom in his book Philosophy: the basics 3rd edition.
He essentially defines negative freedom as the absence of coercion and positive freedom as freedom to exercise control over your own life. So according to Warburton, an alcoholic would be free by the first definition, but not by the second.
thanks i am still confused though. How is an alcoholic not free by the first definiton but free by the second? can you emphasize on that point a little. I am new to all of this, and would be very grateful if you could enlighten me a little. 
The alcoholic is free by the first definition because he is not being coerced into drinking, he can, after all, choose not to be an alcoholic. The alcoholic is not free under positive freedom because it seems highly likely that the alcoholic regrets his binges in more sobering moments, he is a slave to impulse and therefore not able to exercise control over his life. I hope this helps some. let me know.
thanks for your help, sorry for being a dope, i havenāt long since had a baby so the cells are a little rusty, takes a little more effort for things to sink in. hopefully i will become more alert when i get into this course, and learn alot from this site too. Thanks once again for all your replies
You are talking about Isaiah Berlinās distinction:
Negative freedom is āfreedom fromā It is what civil liberties are all about. Freedom, is freedom from restraint and constraint: from being forced not to do something you want to do, or being forced to do something you do not want to do.
Positive freedom is āfreedom to.ā As when people talk about the freedom to work, or the freedom to have a good education.
The French 19th century wrilter, Anatole France, sarcastically as alluding to the need to have more than negative freedom when he wrote:
" The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well
as the poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge. ā¦ "
Of course, it is only the poor who need to sleep under bridges, or beg, or steal. They have the negative freedoms, but need the positive freedoms.
That certainly was not what Isaiah Berlin, who invented the distinction, meant by it.
Your freedom from and freedom to seemed like a much more descriptive definition and very much in line with what i had already stated (aside from the comments about the alcoholic which i quoted from Warburton). I donāt think Isaiah Berlin had the last say on the subject. Ideas generally evolve beyond the confines of tradition.
you are lucky to have philosohpy courses. i am in 8th gradeā¦sniff, and at my school they donāt have any. b/c itāa Christian school. Oh well, i will have to wait for college!
Sounds more like a protestant schoolā¦
ahhaha, i donāt think it is. But they really really only want us to believe in theyāre religion. iām not christian
Welcome to the forum Trinityisdabest. Iām not Christian either. If you could read philosophy, what would you read?