Autobiography

Born and reared in Dublin, I attended Christian Brothers College, Monkstown, Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of Cambridge.

By chance in 1992 I happened to be paying a visit to my alma mater to pick up documentation for an American green card when I bumped into one of my former teachers. He informed me of a vacancy in the Political Science Dept and encouraged me to apply. I ended up teaching at TCD 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 refers to a remark made by his colleague Bernard Williams:

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.

This passage convinced me to abandon my academic ‘career’. There were other factors too of course, such as being fed up with being broke and low-to-zero prospects of permanency. After a ‘transition’ period - being on the dole for several months while looking for work - I managed to get a job. Luckily, a company-sponsored MBA helped make up for lost time and I eventually ended up in a career in corporate communications and change management.

While I enjoy the cut and thrust of the business arena, I have retained a 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.

Up until relatively recently, spending an evening in the company of philosophy was focused on reading rather than on committing any of my thoughts to paper. That changed after a truly magical weekend in Cornwall in September 2016 with a creative writing group called Dark Angels. From then on I found myself writing for the sheer delight of it. 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 don 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. He even wrote a foreword to my book.

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

My second book, Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries, was published in 2021. My most recent volume, Understanding Humanity with Isaiah Berlin, came out in 2026.

I’m now looking forward to making a start on a number of new, quite different projects, including editing (and contributing to) a series of volumes on the philosophy of philosophy and returning to my series Talking to Thinkers.

In October 2025 I was appointed editor of the Dublin Review of Books following a five year stint as managing editor of the academic journal Society.

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

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