Autobiography

Born and reared in Dublin, I was educated at Christian Brothers College, Monkstown, Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of Cambridge. By sheer chance in 1992 - I happened to be paying a one-off visit to my alma mater to pick up documentation for an American green card application when I bumped into one of my former professors - an opportunity had arisen in the Political Science Dept. of Trinity College, Dublin and I ended up teaching political theory there for the next six years.

Then one unfine day in 1998 I found myself reading a collection of essays by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. In the introduction to his book, Nagel remarks:

Bernard Williams once posed the awkward question, What is the point of doing philosophy if you are not extraordinarily good at it? The problem is that you cannot, by sheer hard work, like a historian of modest gifts, make solid discoveries that others can then rely on in building up larger results. If you are not extraordinary, what you do in philosophy will be either unoriginal (and therefore unnecessary) or inadequately supported (and therefore useless). More likely, it will be both unoriginal and wrong.

Reading these lines convinced me, rightly or wrongly, to abandon my ‘career’ as an academic. After a five-month ‘transition’ period (being on the dole while looking for work), I managed to secure employment, reinventing myself as a normal, well-adjusted member of the commercial world. Fortunately, a company-sponsored MBA helped make up for lost time and I eventually fell into a career in corporate communications and change management. Since 1999, I’ve worked in a number of large, multi-national companies, including Diageo, Pfizer, Aviva, AIB Bank and, currently, Takeda. 

While I enjoy the cut and thrust of the business arena, I have retained a keen interest in the life of the mind and especially in philosophy. To paraphrase Chekhov, the day job is my lawful wedded wife and philosophy my mistress. When I’ve had enough of one, I can go and spend the evening with the other.

Up until September 2016, spending an evening in the company of philosophy was limited to reading rather than committing any of my thoughts to paper. Then everything changed during a magical weekend in Cornwall with members of an inspiring writing group called Dark Angels. I began writing for the sheer delight of it. For some reason poems came first and then philosophy which eventually led to my first book, The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin, published in January 2020.

My book on Berlin brought me into contact with Henry Hardy, an Oxford fellow and Isaiah Berlin’s editor: I sent him the book’s preface and, to my surprise (and delight), he responded promptly and enthusiastically asking that I send him the rest of my typescript. His comments proved hugely encouraging and instructive.

As a way of repaying what I regarded as a debt to Hardy, I tried my hand at writing a review of his own book, In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure, which was published in 2018. I submitted my review on spec to the Dublin Review of Books and they agreed to publish it. Since then I’ve published a number of essays and reviews on various topics in the Dublin Review of Books as well as the Times Literary Supplement and Aeon and in more academic publications such as the European Journal of Philosophy and Society.

My second book, Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021. More recently, I have edited a book entitled Understanding Humanity with Isaiah Berlin which contains essays by notable scholars on a selection of Berlin’s best essays. It’s due out from Cambridge University Press in 2026. I am now looking forward to making a start on a number of new, quite different projects, including writing a concise, philosophical introduction to philosophy (most introductions to philosophy are unconcise and unphilosophical), editing (and contributing to) a book on the philosophy of philosophy and doing more interviews for my online series Talking to Thinkers.

In October 2025 I was appointed managing editor of the Dublin Review of Books with effect from 2026 and before that was managing editor of the academic journal Society between 2021 and 2025.

When I’m not busy with my day job, editing or philosophy, I’m usually spending time with my family and friends or walking the dog.

Johnny Lyons - BA (TCD), M.Phil, PhD (Cantab), MBA (DCU)