Reviewed by:

• The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin by Johnny Lyons
• Mario Clemens

A well-established Isaiah Berlin scholar recently pointed out, "Berlin gets us interested in value pluralism, but he leaves us with many questions."¹ Therefore, is it really the case—as value pluralism holds—that human life in general and politics in particular are characterized by potentially conflicting values that cannot be brought into a hierarchy, thus leaving us with tough and sometimes tragic choices? Does pluralism, thus understood, not lead to moral relativism? And what are the political implications of value pluralism?

In the Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin, an encompassing study of Berlin's extensive oeuvre, Johnny Lyons makes an original suggestion for how to address these sustained riddles of Berlin scholarship. For Lyons, the key to understanding Berlin's political theory is his particular notion of philosophy. The author seeks to show "that it is only by unearthing Berlin's conception of philosophy that we can make sense of his political theory" (p. xv).

Lyons—who taught philosophy for six years, then abandoned academia in the late 1990s to work in corporate communications, and now has reentered the philosophical debate with this study on Berlin's philosophy—is highly skeptical of the mainstream way of doing philosophy. Lyons sees much of anglophone moral and political philosophy engaged in a "self-styled scientific enterprise" (p. 213), where philosophy is "identifying itself too closely with science or at the very least with a severely naturalistic mindset" (p. 219). This has led to "weirdly formal and systematic moral theorizing" (p. 214), resulting in "predominantly formal, abstruse and largely unreadable work" (p. 213), which moreover ignores the insights of the "the historical turn" (p. 154, emphasis in the original). According to Lyons, this "current state of largely sterile detachment and ossifying specialization is neither inevitable nor useful" (p. 218).

What Berlin had, and what, according to Lyons, contemporary anglophone philosophy lacks, is the awareness of more than one legitimate way of describing and understanding the world. Notwithstanding the crucial achievements of the natural sciences, this philosophy's positivist methods are not the only possible approaches to genuine insights.

For Lyons, the primary task of philosophy is "to make sense of the world we live in" and to help "us to determine how best to live our lives within that world" (p. 215). And in the light of such a definition of philosophy, Berlin's approach appears preferable to the mainstream analytic tradition.

The claim that scientific explanations do not exhaust the possibilities of rational insight is, of course, not new. Lyons himself points to the parallels between Berlin's "humanistic philosophy" (p. 214) and "the twentieth-century phenomenological turn to capture the Lifeworld or Lebenswelt, the intelligible field of our common subjective experience" (p. 221). Moreover, there is an [End Page 472] obvious parallel to the hermeneutic tradition (from Friedrich Schleiermacher, via Wilhelm Dilthey, to Hans-Georg Gadamer), which emphasizes understanding (Verstehen) as opposed to explaining (Erklären).

Innovative, then, is not Lyons's claim that he has found a philosopher with a more human-centered way of doing philosophy. Instead, what is noteworthy is his suggestion that the themes Berlin scholars grapple with will appear in a new light once we pay sufficient attention to Berlin's particular understanding of philosophy.

The book consists of five parts. In his "general introduction," Lyons introduces readers, especially those unfamiliar with Berlin, to his political philosophy. Lyons also addresses some of the likely objections against treating Berlin as a political philosopher (as opposed to a historian of ideas or "mere" essayist).

In part two, Lyons explores Berlin's particular understanding of philosophy. For Lyons, two insights set Berlin apart from the dominant analytic tradition. First, Berlin adopts Immanuel Kant's claims that we see the world through concepts and categories of our own making. Second, Berlin takes on board two of Giambattista Vico's observations: we cannot look at the world from outside history, only through historical perspectives; and we nevertheless do have access to the outlooks of past epochs and their thinkers because our shared humanity enables...

审阅者：

• 约翰尼·里昂斯的《以赛亚·柏林的哲学》
• 马里奥·克莱门斯

一位著名的以赛亚·柏林学者最近指出，“柏林让我们对价值多元化产生了兴趣，但他给我们留下了许多问题。” ¹因此，情况真的是这样吗——正如价值多元主义所认为的那样——一般人类生活，特别是政治，都具有潜在冲突的价值观，而这些价值观无法被纳入等级制度，从而给我们留下艰难的、有时甚至是悲剧性的选择？这样理解的多元主义不会导致道德相对主义吗？价值多元化的政治含义是什么？

在《以赛亚·柏林的哲学》一书中，约翰尼·里昂斯对柏林的广泛著作进行了全面的研究，他就如何解决柏林学术界这些持续存在的谜团提出了独创性的建议。对于里昂来说，理解伯林政治理论的关键是他独特的哲学概念。作者试图表明“只有通过挖掘伯林的哲学概念，我们才能理解他的政治理论”（第xv页）。

里昂斯教授了六年哲学，然后在 20 世纪 90 年代末放弃了学术界，从事企业传播工作，现在通过这项关于柏林哲学的研究重新进入了哲学辩论，他对主流的哲学研究方式高度怀疑。里昂斯认为许多英语国家的道德和政治哲学都参与了“自封的科学事业”（第213页），其中哲学“将自己与科学过于紧密地联系在一起，或者至少与一种严重的自然主义心态”（第219页） ）。这导致了“奇怪的正式和系统的道德理论化”（第214页），导致“主要是正式的、深奥的和基本上不可读的作品”（第213页），而且忽视了“历史转向”的见解（第214页）。 154、强调原文）。根据里昂的说法，“目前这种基本上毫无生气的分离和僵化的专业化状态既不是不可避免的，也没有用处”（第 218 页）。

伯林所拥有的，而根据里昂的说法，当代英语哲学所缺乏的是对不止一种描述和理解世界的合法方式的认识。尽管自然科学取得了重要成就，但这种哲学的实证主义方法并不是获得真正见解的唯一可能途径。

对于里昂来说，哲学的首要任务是“理解我们生活的世界”并帮助“我们确定如何在这个世界中最好地生活”（第215页）。根据这样的哲学定义，伯林的方法似乎比主流分析传统更可取。

当然，科学解释并没有穷尽理性洞察力的可能性的说法并不新鲜。莱昂斯本人指出了伯林的“人文主义哲学”（第214页）和“二十世纪捕捉生活世界或生活世界的现象学转向，即我们共同主观经验的可理解领域”（第221页）之间的相似之处。此外，与解释学传统（从弗里德里希·施莱尔马赫（Friedrich Schleiermacher）到威廉·狄尔泰（Wilhelm Dilthey）到汉斯·格奥尔格·伽达默尔（Hans-Georg Gadamer））有明显的相似之处[结束第472页] ，它强调理解（ Verstehen）而不是解释（Erklären）。

那么，创新并不是里昂声称他找到了一位以更加以人为中心的哲学方式进行哲学的哲学家的说法。相反，值得注意的是他的建议，即一旦我们充分关注柏林对哲学的特殊理解，柏林学者所努力解决的主题就会以新的眼光出现。

本书由五部分组成。在他的“概述”中，里昂向读者，特别是那些不熟悉柏林的读者介绍他的政治哲学。里昂还解决了一些可能反对将柏林视为政治哲学家（而不是思想史学家或“纯粹”散文家）的反对意见。

在第二部分中，里昂探讨了伯林对哲学的特殊理解。对于里昂来说，有两个见解使柏林有别于主流的分析传统。首先，柏林采纳了伊曼努尔·康德的主张，即我们通过自己创造的概念和范畴来看待世界。其次，柏林接受了詹巴蒂斯塔·维柯的两个观察：我们不能从外部历史来看世界，只能通过历史的视角；尽管如此，我们确实能够了解过去时代及其思想家的观点，因为我们共同的人性使……