Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries

by Johnny Lyons

Overview

This book sets out to identify the nature and implications of a proper understanding of pluralism in a original and illuminating way. Isaiah Berlin believed that a recognition of pluralism is vital to a free, decent and civilised society. By looking below at the often neglected foundations of Berlin’s celebrated account of moral pluralism, Lyons reveals the more philosophically profound aspects of his undogmatic and humanistic liberal vision. He achieves this by comparing Berlin’s core ideas with those of several of his most distinguished philosophical contemporaries, an exercise which yields not only a deeper grasp of Berlin and several major twentieth-century thinkers, principally A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, Bernard Williams and Quentin Skinner, but, more broadly, a keener appreciation of the power of history and philosophy to help us make sense of our predicament.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030731779
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	07/21/2021
Edition description:	1st ed. 2021
Pages:	299
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Johnny Lyons taught Political Theory at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, before joining the commercial world, where he works in change management. He is the author of the critically acclaimed The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin (2020) and a contributor to the Dublin Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement and Aeon.

Table of Contents

Introduction.
Chapter 1: Berlin and A. J. Ayer on morality.
Chapter 2: Berlin and J. L. Austin on philosophy.
Chapter 3: Berlin and P. F. Strawson on free will.
Chapter 4: Berlin and Quentin Skinner on history.
Chapter 5: Berlin and Bernard Williams on liberalism.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Anyone who reads Johnny Lyons on Isaiah Berlin and his philosophical contemporaries will quickly realise that [he] is a true philosopher through and through. He lives and breathes philosophy, and it keeps him awake at night, just as it didn’t keep Isaiah Berlin awake at night, which is one of the reasons he used to give for allegedly switching from philosophy to the history of ideas. [Lyons] is also terrifyingly well read: where does he find the time, especially given his full-time unphilosophical job? And what he writes is continuously dense, serious, subtle, sophisticated and nuanced.” (Henry Hardy, Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, Isaiah Berlin's editor and author of In Search of Isaiah Berlin (2018))