Daniele Botti: John Rawls and American Pragmatism: Between Engagement and Avoidance. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. Pp. xix, 231.)

Abstract

as well as on the work of Richard Bellamy, John Kekes, Martha Nussbaum, and Bernard Williams. His reading of their works is informative, even setting aside their relation to Berlin. If there is one drawback to his discussion, it is that his conceptual approach seems susceptible to the weakness of all deductive arguments. When value pluralism is defined in such a way as to lead to key components of liberalism, then one cannot help but wonder how things would look if it was defined differently, particularly if value pluralism did not involve a concern for coherence. Crowder notes this objection (136–37), but this may be a bigger problem than he allows. As regards Lyons, he relates Berlin’s arguments directly to those of Richard Rorty, Quentin Skinner, Galen Strawson, and Charles Taylor, as well as various others, such as Hume, Nietzsche, Plato, and Socrates. The sweep is impressive, and it is clear that Lyons has been thinking about these issues for a while. However, if there is a misstep in his discussion, it is the earnestness mentioned before, which leads him to dismiss much of the secondary literature as overly pedantic. This is a bit of a mistake. Lyons’s final argument is reminiscent of John Gray’s, and fuller treatment of Gray and other Berlin scholars would help clarify the differences between them. Nevertheless, Lyons’s book is a noteworthy contribution to Berlin scholarship, and, like Crowder’s, merits the attention of anyone interested in these issues.