The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin
Title | The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin PDF eBook |
Author | Johnny Lyons |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Pages | 305 |
Release | 2020-01-23 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1350121452 |
'I gradually came to the conclusion that I should prefer a field in which one could hope to know more at the end of one's life than when one had begun.' So thought Isaiah Berlin toward the end of the Second World War, when he decided to bid farewell to philosophy in favour of the history of ideas. In The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin Johnny Lyons shows that Berlin's approach to intellectual history amounted to the pursuit of philosophy by other means, creating a more original and fruitful engagement with his lifelong subject. By recasting Berlin as a philosopher who took humanity and history seriously, Lyons reveals the underlying unity of his wide-ranging and disparate ideas and throws into sharp relief the enduring moral charm of his outlook. Lyons emphasises aspects of Berlin's thinking that have largely been neglected. These include his recognition of historical contingency and of the importance of truth in human affairs, his scepticism about the so-called implications of determinism for our everyday understanding of freedom, and his deeper reasons for thinking that negative liberty should be valued. This introduction to Berlin's thought, and particularly its examination of these mainly overlooked elements of his outlook, reveals a new Berlin, one with surprising and urgent contemporary relevance to the debates that continue to dominate philosophy, politics and intellectual history today.
Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment
Title | Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment PDF eBook |
Author | Laurence Brockliss |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 403 |
Release | 2016-10-20 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0191086541 |
Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) was recognized as Britain's most distinguished historian of ideas. Many of his essays discussed thinkers of what this book calls the 'long Enlightenment' (from Vico in the eighteenth century to Marx and Mill in the nineteenth, with Machiavelli as a precursor). Yet he is particularly associated with the concept of the 'Counter-Enlightenment', comprising those thinkers (Herder, Hamann, and even Kant) who in Berlin's view reacted against the Enlightenment's naïve rationalism, scientism and progressivism, its assumption that human beings were basically homogeneous and could be rendered happy by the remorseless application of scientific reason. Berlin's 'Counter-Enlightenment' has received critical attention, but no-one has yet analysed the understanding of the Enlightenment on which it rests. Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment explores the development of Berlin's conception of the Enlightenment, noting its curious narrowness, its ambivalence, and its indebtedness to a specific German intellectual tradition. Contributors to the book examine his comments on individual writers, showing how they were inflected by his questionable assumptions, and arguing that some of the writers he assigned to the 'Counter-Enlightenment' have closer affinities to the Enlightenment than he recognized. By locating Berlin in the history of Enlightenment studies, this book also makes a contribution to defining the historical place of his work and to evaluating his intellectual legacy.
Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries
Title | Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries PDF eBook |
Author | Johnny Lyons |
Publisher | Springer Nature |
Pages | 299 |
Release | 2021-07-20 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 3030731782 |
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.
Two Concepts of Liberty
Title | Two Concepts of Liberty PDF eBook |
Author | Isaiah Berlin |
Publisher | |
Pages | 57 |
Release | 1966 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Concepts and Categories
Title | Concepts and Categories PDF eBook |
Author | Isaiah Berlin |
Publisher | Random House |
Pages | 307 |
Release | 2012-08-31 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN | 1448155460 |
Although Isaiah Berlin liked to say that he left philosophy for the history of ideas after the Second World War, there is a decided continuity between his more purely philosophical writings, most of which are collected in this volume, and the more historical work for which he is better known. Included here are Berlin's early arguments against logical positivism and later essays which more evidently reflect his life-long interest in political theory, intellectual history and the philosophy of history. In two related pieces he gives his view on the philosopher's task, to uncover the various models - the concepts and categories - that we bring to our experience, and that help to form it. In his own words 'The goal of philosophy is always the same, to assist men to understand themselves and thus operate in the open, and not wildly, in the dark.'
A Mind and Its Time
Title | A Mind and Its Time PDF eBook |
Author | Joshua L. Cherniss |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 283 |
Release | 2013-03-28 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0199673268 |
A detailed study of Isaiah Berlin: historian, philosopher, and political theorist. Situates his evolving ideas in the context of British society and world politics. Offers a new interpretation of Berlin's influential writings on liberty and his debts to philosophy, and makes clear his relationship to the political debates of his times.
The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin
Title | The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin PDF eBook |
Author | Joshua L. Cherniss |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 325 |
Release | 2018-10-04 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 1107138507 |
Isaiah Berlin remains one of the seminal political philosophers of the twentieth century. This book explains his enduring relevance as we face the challenges of the twenty-first.