ABSTRACT
Gyorgy Markus is a great storyteller. His tales are of the history of philosophy. He weaves his narratives with an unmatched knowledge of the history of philosophy and culture and a sharp eye for philosophical distinctions and nuance. He delights in paradox but is never frivolous. He enjoys nothing more than problematising key distinctions, in excavating their hidden history, exposing their secret tensions and ultimate inconsistencies. He particularly enjoys being able to show that contemporary philosophers are not as clever or as original as they sometimes like to believe. He wants to conjure perplexity, shake up our preconceptions, complacency but finally also leave us a little wiser than before. Think of his analyses cf the concept of culture or that of positive and negative freedom (Markus 1997; 1999). His scepticism always operates under the strict command of his commitment to enlightenment and the continuing importance and value of philosophy. Yet, not even this commitment is immune from paradox. Markus also tells a story about philosophy. In this narrative, the glory days of philosophy are past. It is in crisis and has lost its former public function. The philosopher is no longer the sophos of the ancients devoted to the philosophical life and elite school or the enlightenment representative of every man who suppressed particularity in favour of universal reason and the republic of letters. Today the philosopher speaks for nobody but him/herself. Philosophy is regarded as private opinion. At best it supplies visions as commodities. This normative pluralisation signkls the fact that philosophy no longer carries the burden of public responsibility. Awkwardly located between the institutional demands of the university and a purely private existence, the philosopher has been unburdened from the expectation to live with the consistency that was once
the requirement of living the 'philosophical life' (Markus, 1999b). As usual, the Markus narrative is compelling: comprehensive, unsentimental.
