An interesting thinker: Johnny Lyons

 I’ve started following the writing of Johnny Lyons, who strikes me as an interesting philosopher.

I came across his essay on the American philosopher Thomas Nagel in the Dublin Review of Books. Lyons mentions a couple of Nagel’s characteristics:

• You can write about philosophy or you can do it. Nagel always ends up doing it, thinking aloud as he’s writing.

• Some philosophers build vast systems, providing answers to questions. For others, philosophy is more about the questions than the answers. Nagel is fond of the questions.

I’d agree that both observations apply to Nagel. It seems to me that both observations also apply to Lyons.

Lyons is not an academic philosopher, and I admire his efforts to get philosophical ideas out on the street.

He’s recorded a series of dialogs called “Talking to Thinkers.” His conversation with Cheryl Misak, a philosopher at the University of Toronto who is interested in pragmatism, is fascinating.

• Sources: Johnny Lyons, “Problems, Problems”; Dublin Review of Books, February 2023. You can find it here:

https://drb.ie/articles/problems-problems/

Lyons’s website is at https://johnnylyons.org. The story of how Lyons abandoned a Ph.D. and went to work in the corporate world is under “Autobiography.”