Universities in many liberal democracies, such as the US, the UK, or Germany, grapple with a pivotal question: how much room should be given to controversial utterances? On the one side, there are those who advocate for limiting permissible speech on campus to create a safe environment for a diverse student body and counter the mainstreaming of extremist views, particularly by right-wing populists. On the other side, concerns arise about stifling the free exchange of ideas and creating an atmosphere of (...) fear and censorship. The debate is further complicated by participants’ occasional uncertainties about the legal norms relevant in the given context, such as when freedom of speech is an issue and when it is not. This paper addresses the question of whether universities should allow actors with primarily political (as opposed to scholarly) agendas to speak on campus. Focusing on German universities, we begin by discussing some of the potentially relevant legal norms. We then propose shifting emphasis from _whether_ we should make room for public political discussions on campus to _how_ such events must be organized so that they deliver the goods that their advocates emphasize while avoiding the dangers of which critics warn. Drawing on conflict management literature concerned with process design, we make several practical suggestions on how to organize an event that brings political discourse to the university campus without causing harm. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin by Johnny LyonsMario ClemensThe Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin, by Johnny Lyons; 276 pp. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.A well-established Isaiah Berlin scholar recently pointed out, "Berlin gets us interested in value pluralism, but he leaves us with many questions."1 Therefore, is it really the case—as value pluralism holds—that human life in general and politics in particular are characterized by potentially conflicting values that cannot (...) be brought into a hierarchy, thus leaving us with tough and sometimes tragic choices? Does pluralism, thus understood, not lead to moral relativism? And what are the political implications of value pluralism?In the Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin, an encompassing study of Berlin's extensive oeuvre, Johnny Lyons makes an original suggestion for how to address these sustained riddles of Berlin scholarship. For Lyons, the key to understanding Berlin's political theory is his particular notion of philosophy. The author seeks to show "that it is only by unearthing Berlin's conception of philosophy that we can make sense of his political theory" (p. xv).Lyons—who taught philosophy for six years, then abandoned academia in the late 1990s to work in corporate communications, and now has reentered the philosophical debate with this study on Berlin's philosophy—is highly skeptical of the mainstream way of doing philosophy. Lyons sees much of anglophone moral and political philosophy engaged in a "self-styled scientific enterprise" (p. 213), where philosophy is "identifying itself too closely with science or at the very least with a severely naturalistic mindset" (p. 219). This has led to "weirdly formal and systematic moral theorizing" (p. 214), resulting in "predominantly formal, abstruse and largely unreadable work" (p. 213), which moreover ignores the insights of the "the historical turn" (p. 154, emphasis in the original). According to Lyons, this "current state of largely sterile detachment and ossifying specialization is neither inevitable nor useful" (p. 218).What Berlin had, and what, according to Lyons, contemporary anglophone philosophy lacks, is the awareness of more than one legitimate way of describing and understanding the world. Notwithstanding the crucial achievements of the natural sciences, this philosophy's positivist methods are not the only possible approaches to genuine insights.For Lyons, the primary task of philosophy is "to make sense of the world we live in" and to help "us to determine how best to live our lives within that world" (p. 215). And in the light of such a definition of philosophy, Berlin's approach appears preferable to the mainstream analytic tradition.The claim that scientific explanations do not exhaust the possibilities of rational insight is, of course, not new. Lyons himself points to the parallels between Berlin's "humanistic philosophy" (p. 214) and "the twentieth-century phenomenological turn to capture the Lifeworld or Lebenswelt, the intelligible field of our common subjective experience" (p. 221). Moreover, there is an [End Page 472] obvious parallel to the hermeneutic tradition (from Friedrich Schleiermacher, via Wilhelm Dilthey, to Hans-Georg Gadamer), which emphasizes understanding (Verstehen) as opposed to explaining (Erklären).Innovative, then, is not Lyons's claim that he has found a philosopher with a more human-centered way of doing philosophy. Instead, what is noteworthy is his suggestion that the themes Berlin scholars grapple with will appear in a new light once we pay sufficient attention to Berlin's particular understanding of philosophy.The book consists of five parts. In his "general introduction," Lyons introduces readers, especially those unfamiliar with Berlin, to his political philosophy. Lyons also addresses some of the likely objections against treating Berlin as a political philosopher (as opposed to a historian of ideas or "mere" essayist).In part two, Lyons explores Berlin's particular understanding of philosophy. For Lyons, two insights set Berlin apart from the dominant analytic tradition. First, Berlin adopts Immanuel Kant's claims that we see the world through concepts and categories of our own making. Second, Berlin takes on board two of Giambattista Vico's observations: we cannot look at the world from outside history, only through historical perspectives; and we nevertheless do have access to the outlooks of past epochs and their thinkers because our shared humanity enables... (shrink)