Isaiah Berlin Memorial Lecture 2013: John Gray, British political philosopher

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Channel: Fonds DOTS

Views: 22,630

Rating: 4.7919073 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy (Professional Field), Philosophy Of Mind (Idea), John Gray (Author), Riga (City/Town/Village), Latvia (Country), isaiah berlin

Id: rrVY4Uz16v0

Length: 86min 59sec (5219 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 10 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Qwill2]

The speaker is John Gray (wiki) and the title of the lecture seems to be Isaiah Berlin and the Meaning of Freedom:

John Nicholas Gray (born 17 April 1948, in South Shields, then in County Durham) is an English political philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He is formerly School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

He has written several influential books, including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), which argues that free market globalization is an unstable Enlightenment project currently in the process of disintegration, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2003), which attacks philosophical humanism, a worldview which Gray sees as originating in religious ideologies, and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), a critique of utopian thinking in the modern world.

Gray sees volition, and hence morality, as an illusion, and portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life. Gray writes that 'humans ... cannot destroy the Earth, but they can easily wreck the environment that sustains them.'

• Here (PDF) is the first chapter of John Gray's book, Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought, titled The Idea of Freedom.

• More links about John Gray on /r/HistoryofIdeas, among them reviews of his latest book, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths.

• More links about John Gray from isaiahberlin.org