Published writings
Books
The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin (2020: Bloomsbury)
Towards the end of the Second World War Isaiah Berlin (1909 - 1997) decided to leave philosophy for the history of ideas. The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin 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 reframing Berlin as a philosopher who took humanity and history seriously, this study reveals the underlying unity of his wide-ranging ideas and throws into sharp focus the enduring interest and resonance of his worldview.
Available in hardback, paperback (reprinted in 2020, twice in 2021) and ebook
Click here to view John Banville’s launch of my book in Dublin in January 2020
Reviews
Required reading for anyone interested in Berlin, and in the life of the mind. John Banville, Winner of the 2005 Booker Prize
Every now and then in life one encounters a book that stands head and shoulders above its surroundings. For me Johnny Lyons’s study of Isaiah Berlin’s ideas is such a book. Henry Hardy, Berlin’s principal editor and author of In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure
My second book, Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021.
From the back cover:
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.
Click here to view pen portraits (that don’t appear in the book) of Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries
Click here to view the launch of my book together with Kei Hiruta’s Arendt and Berlin at Wolfson College Oxford in December 2021.
Articles / Essays / Interviews
‘Morality, Politics and Contingency’ - European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 31, Issue 1, March 2023, pp. 179--194.
‘Harvard’s Last Conservative: An Interview with Harvey Mansfield’, Society, Vol.60, No.1, 2023, pp. 1-10.
‘Problems, problems: On Thomas Nagel’s View of Philosophy’ - Dublin Review of Books, Issue 152, February 2023.
‘Editor’s Introduction: A Complex Humanism’ to a Symposium marking the fiftieth anniversary of Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity, including contributions by William Cain (Wellesley), Jane O’Grady (London), and Eoghan Smith (Carlow), - Society, Vol.59, No.5, 2022, pp. 489-493.
Philip Larkin at 100: A Tribute - Dublin Review of Books, July 2022, Vol. 146
‘Editor’s Introduction’ to a Symposium on ‘The State of Analytic Political Theory’, including contributions by Philip Pettit (Princeton), Maeve McKeown (Groningen), Jonathan Floyd (Bristol), Eileen Hunt (Notre Dame) and Paul Kelly (LSE) - Society, Vol.59, No.2, 2022, pp.97-98
‘Discovering Isaiah Berlin’: Johnny Lyons in Conversation with Henry Hardy - Society, Vol.58, No.6, 2021, pp. 463-477
‘The Question of Rawls’s Legacy’ - Society, Vol.58, No.1, 2021, pp. 26-32
‘Some Remarks on Henry Hardy’s Two Theses’ (April, 2021)
‘In Pursuit of the Fox’ -The Sundial, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, July 2020
‘Isaiah Berlin: Philosopher of the human’ - Aeon, December 2019
‘Is it time?’ - Dublin Review of Books, September 2019
‘Liberalism under threat’ - Dublin Review of Books, December 2018
Book Reviews
Book Review Forum on Thomas Nagel: One of eight reviews of Moral Feelings, Moral Reality and Moral Progress by Thomas Nagel - Society, Issue 2 (March/April), 2024. Other reviews by Simon Blackburn, Paul Bloomfield, John Cottingham, Richard Kraut, Paul Seabright, and Alan Thomas.
‘Up Mount Improbable’ A review of Parfit: A Philosopher with a Mission to Save Morality by David Edmonds - Dublin Review of Books, Issue 154, October 2023
‘Is Larkin good for you?’ A review of Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin, by Clive James - Dublin Review of Books, December 2019
‘The hegemony of history’ A review of Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction by Quentin Skinner - Dublin Review of Books, September 2019
‘Ideas of history’ A review of Enlightenment Philosophy in a Nutshell by Jane O’Grady - Times Literary Supplement, May 2019
‘Philosopher in a hurry’ Making the Most of It by Bryan Magee - Dublin Review of Books, February 2019
‘The Genius and the Pedant’ In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure by Henry Hardy (Dublin Review of Books, November 2018). A slightly longer version of this review was published in the Corpus Christi College, Oxford, annual magazine The Pelican Record, Vol. LV December 2019
Miscellaneous
The Truth of Living in Interesting Times - Contribution the Falcon Windsor Monthly Blog (October, 2022)
‘A haiku and commentary’ on the beauty and fragility of wetlands (October, 2021)
26 Letters: I took part in a creative writing project during the summer of 2020 which involved each participant being assigned a letter from the alphabet (mine was ‘C’) and then writing a letter t and/or from one of their favourite fictional characters. I decided to write an letter from Clarissa Dalloway from Virginia Woolf’s novel to Connell Waldron from Sally Rooney’s Normal People. November 2020
Co-wrote with Henry Hardy a number of letters to the editor published in the Times Literary Supplement in June 2020
Contributing advisor to the latest edition (July 2020) of the entry on Isaiah Berlin in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
I have acted as a peer reviewer for the following academic journals: Modern Intellectual History; Acta Analytica; History of Political Thought; Society; The Journal of Value Inquiry; as well as Bloomsbury Academic publishers