Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries

Rezensionen / Stimmen

"Johnny Lyons' Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries is both unique and valuable. . What makes Lyons's work unique is that he uses a number of Berlin's anglophone philosophical contemporaries, with all of whom Berlin was personally acquainted, as a contrast and a foil. No one has done this before. . What makes the book so valuable is the vitality which it breathes into the individual philosophical problems, through the interplay between the often deeply varying positions adopted by the respective thinkers. In short, the volume represents a cardinal contribution to the study of Berlin and his opus, but also throws an illuminating sidelight on the thinkers with whom he is contrasted." (Roger Hausheer, former Lecturer in German at the University of Bradford, Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and author of seminal introductions to both Isaiah Berlin's "Against the Current: Studies in the History of Ideas" (1979) and the definitive anthology of Berlin's writings "The Proper Study of Mankind" (1997))

"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))