Jagiellonian University in Kraków

English abstract: The aim of the article is to carry out a parallel analysis of Isaiah Berlin’s and Leszek Kołakowski’s ethical visions. Special attention is given to the ideas developed by both thinkers in their early two essays, both published in 1958, though their later works are also taken into account. Juxtaposition of several threads inherent in their essays, backed by appropriate excerpts from their work, leads to the following conclusions. Both philosophers draw stunningly similar visions of moral life. Both of them dissociate themselves from ethical monism and from ethical relativism. However, Berlin’s standpoint, named by him value pluralism, is of strictly empiricist and thus anti-metaphysical character, while Kołakowski claims that in ethics there is no escape from metaphysics.

Keywords: Isaiah Berlin, Leszek Kołakowski, value pluralism, ethical monism, ethical relativism, empiricism, myth

Language: Polish

Published: Number 3(28)/2021, pp. 95-106

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2021.3.95

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Number of downloads: 519

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

University of Oxford

English abstract: Against Beata Polanowksa-Sygulska (BP-S), I insist on the incompatibility between the pluralism of comprehensive world-views and belief in the monist, universalist tenets of the principal world religions, noting that God the Father and God the Son were both monists. I argue that my position is entailed by Isaiah Berlin’s rejection of the unique truth of any one comprehensive outlook, and that both Berlin and BP-S confuse toleration with acceptance. I reject the charges that my position is monistic, and that I give insufficient attention to conflict within individual values, which can in any case be treated as conflict between values.

Keywords: God, monism, pluralism, religion, Isaiah Berlin

Language: English

Published: Number 3(24)/2020, pp. 130-132.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.3.130

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Jagiellonian University in Kraków

Abstract: The article discusses Henry Hardy’s book In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure, published in the fall of 2018. The author was Berlin’s closest collaborator and is the editor or co-editor of eighteen volumes of his works and four volumes of his letters. The first part of the book is a memoir, here discussed briefly; the main focus is on the second, philosophical, section. Hardy’s investigations into Berlin’s ideas are analysed and criticised. Special attention is given to his unresolved discussion with Berlin on the relationship between pluralism and religion. A number of critical arguments against Hardy’s thesis of their mutual exclusion are put forward. The key argument is that it is possible for a true pluralist to adhere to a universalist religion. This is the same position as that adopted by Berlin.

Keywords: Isaiah Berlin, value pluralism, cultural pluralism, religious monism, universalist religion

Language: English

Published: Number 2(20)/2019, pp. 89-99.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2019.2.89

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University of Oxford

English abstract: Henry Hardy responds to various minor points in Beata Polanowska-Sygulska’s review of his book In Search of Isaiah Berlin, and argues that she provides no good reason to resist his claim that Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism is inconsistent with mainstream forms of religious belief.

Keywords: value pluralism, religion, Isaiah Berlin

Language: English

Published: Number 2(20)/2012, pp. 100-103.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2019.2.100

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Number of downloads: 673

Jagiellonian University in Kraków

Abstract: In 2014 Yilin Press published a Chinese translation of a book “Unfinished Dialogue” by Isaiah Berlin and Beata Polanowska-Sygulska. The text presents the letters exchanged between Beata Polanowska-Sygulska and Yang Deyou, the translator of the book and an expert in Polish and English studies, and which led to the creation of the foreword to the Chinese edition of the book.

Keywords: Isaiah Berlin, Unfinished Dialogue, Yang Deyou
(English title, abstract and keywords supplied by the editors)

Language: Polish

Published: Numer 2(11)/2015, p. 20-26.

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Number of downloads: 317

Oxford University / Jagiellonian University in Kraków

Abstract: The text consists of the excerpts from a book “Unfinished Dialogue” by Isaiah Berlin and Beata Polanowska-Sygulska published in New York in 2006. The passages include one of the letters that the British philosopher wrote to Beata Polanowska-Sygulska in 1986, printed earlier in „The New York Review of Books”, and a transcript from a discussion between Isaiah Berlin, Beata Polanowska-Sygulska and John Gray that took place in 1988.

Keywords: Isaiah Berlin, Unfinished Dialogue, essentialism, human nature
(English title, abstract and keywords supplied by the editors)

Language: Polish

Published: Numer 2(11)/2015, p. 5-19.

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Number of downloads: 379