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Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays
Product Review This collection of eight essays spans the range of Isaiah Berlin's interests, including his role in the disputes of language philosophers in the 1930s, his interest in political philosophy, and his later attention to the history of ideas. In Berlin's preface, he records his decision to abandon philosophy for history in the 1940s, but by his own definition of philosophy, given in the first essay ("The Purpose of Philosophy"), he continued to be a philosopher par excellence, radically questioning the models, or categories, by which human beings understand their world. Berlin sees this as the perennial task of the philosopher (which he recognizes as "agonizing and thankless") and one he takes up in this collection with analyses in chapters such as "Verification" and "Equality." It is doubtful now whether Berlin's view of philosophy would be taken as an exhaustive account of the enterprise, especially with the flourishing in the last 25 years of applied ethics and political philosophy. And it seems reasonable to suppose that philosophy will continue to involve speculative work about the proper ends of human life, as well as logical analysis. Berlin's paradoxical contribution, evident in this collection, was that in committing himself to a life of radical questioning of concepts and categories, he in fact proposed a purpose for life, namely the creation of a society that would not be duped by incoherent and idealistic models of the world. Radical philosophical questioning, that drive for clarity in language and for models of the world that are capable of empirical testing, is not in such circumstances the Sisyphean endeavor it might otherwise appear. --Jeff Petts, Amazon.co.uk Michael Ignatieff, The New York Review of Books "He left the moral quality of his voice behind him, in the long tumbling paragraphs and the clauses within clauses of his best essays, and it is to these that we can turn when we need to remind ourselves what intellectual life can be: joyful, free of illusion, and vitally alive." Reader Reviews This review is from: Concepts and Categories (Selected Writings) (Hardcover) This second volume of the collected essays edited by Henry Hardy is in a sense the least interesting of all the volumes of essays. It contains more of the purely analytic philosophical work which is I believe for most readers the least interesting side of Berlin. Berlin's best writing is when he engages other thinkers , when he deals with history and politics in substantial ways. Nonetheless Berlin is Berlin a wonderfully clear and significance- making writer. The essays have the titles: Purpose of Philosophy, Verification, Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements, Logical Translation,Equality, The Concept of Scientific History, Does Political Theory still exist , ' From Hope and Fear Set Free' Comment | | (Report this)
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