Reviews for Isaiah Berlin

The average rating for Isaiah Berlin based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-05-14 00:00:00 Fiammeni Emiliano Isaiah Berlin and John Gray are up there at the top of my list of favourite non fiction writers, so latter writing about the former should be amazing? Sadly not. At their best, the two of them have a flair for the particular, the concrete, the real, that makes their prose fly, gives it life in a way that most philosophy totally fails. Sadly, some times they also write for other philosophers, and when writing for that audience, they cannot help but fall back on academese and write turgid tedious prose filled with overly specific jargon that is repeated endlessly. This isn't to say I got nothing from this book, far from it. It has helped to clarify a few areas of Berlin's thoughts, but I can't say I enjoyed the experience. It felt far too much like work, and when reading both Berlin and Gray at their best it only ever feels like pleasure.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-07-01 00:00:00 Melanie Johnson Isaiah Berlin's philosophy has intigued me for along time. His "self-creation through choice-making" reminds me of the transcendentalists, especially Margaret Fuller. This competent book discusses his concept of value pluralism, including "rivalrous and incommensurable" values (p. 177). Berlin says decent society must "maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurance of desperate situations, of intolerable choices" among values. (p.201) We need to understand this, don't we? We must learn that our world is not a place of uniformity in our thinking or in our values and beliefs.