El romanticismo de Isaiah Berlin

Abstract

The historian of the British ideas of Latvian origin, Isaiah Berlin, offered a clear and accessible approach to the romantic movement in a series of talks - the A. W. Mellon lectures - that took place in 1965, subsequently covered by its editor Henry Hardy in a volume called The roots of romanticism (1999). The thesis of Berlin is that from a philosophical point of view the romanticism was the greatest transformation of the modern western mindset. Some of the tenets of romanticism are consistent with the character of its own thought, based on an epistemological pluralism that rejects the axiological commensurability (whether moral values, because aesthetic) as well as the belief in a final human knowledge. This position, which does not make Berlin a relativist, makes him an author especially suitable for studying the phenomenon. It should be noted that the exposure that Berlin performed in this work does not respond to the identities of a detailed academic study, but that is adjusted to the oral nature to which it was intended. Why not the analysis loses rigor, and focuses successively in the sociohistorical context in which the movement emerged, the factors that determined, the philosophers who propped up and the enormous influence he had subsequently.