31 Facts About Isaiah Berlin

Sir Isaiah Berlin was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas.

In 1932, at the age of twenty-three, Berlin was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford.

Isaiah Berlin was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964.

Isaiah Berlin was appointed a CBE in 1946, knighted in 1957, and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1971.

Isaiah Berlin was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978.

Isaiah Berlin received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties, and on 25 November 1994 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto, for which occasion he prepared a "short credo", now known as "A Message to the Twenty-First Century", to be read on his behalf at the ceremony.

An annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture is held at the Hampstead Synagogue, at Wolfson College, Oxford, at the British Academy, and in Riga.

Isaiah Berlin was born on 6 June 1909 into a wealthy Jewish family, the only son of Mendel Isaiah Berlin, a timber trader, and his wife Marie, nee Volshonok.

Isaiah Berlin's family owned a timber company, one of the largest in the Baltics, as well as forests in Russia, from where the timber was floated down the Daugava river to its sawmills in Riga.

Isaiah Berlin's Russian-speaking mother, Marie Volshonok, was fluent in Yiddish and Latvian.

Isaiah Berlin spent his first six years in Riga and later lived in Andreapol and Petrograd.

Isaiah Berlin decided to apply again, only to a different college: Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Isaiah Berlin subsequently took another degree at Oxford in philosophy, politics and economics, again taking first-class honours after less than a year on the course.

Isaiah Berlin was appointed a tutor in philosophy at New College, Oxford, and soon afterwards was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, the first unconverted Jew to achieve this fellowship at All Souls.

Isaiah Berlin was to remain at Oxford for the rest of his life, apart from a period working for British Information Services in New York from 1940 to 1942 and for the British embassies in Washington, DC, and Moscow from then until 1946.

Isaiah Berlin stayed in Estoril, at the Hotel Palacio, between 19 and 24 October 1940.

In 1956 Isaiah Berlin married Aline Elisabeth Yvonne Halban, nee de Gunzbourg, the former wife of nuclear physicist Hans Halban, and a former winner of the ladies' golf championship of France.

Isaiah Berlin was from an exiled half Russian-aristocratic and half ennobled-Jewish banking and petroleum family based in Paris.

Isaiah Berlin was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959, and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1975.

Isaiah Berlin was instrumental in the founding, in 1966, of a new graduate college at Oxford University: Wolfson College.

Isaiah Berlin was a member of the Founding Council of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University.

Isaiah Berlin did not enjoy writing, and his published work was produced by means of conversational dictation to a tape-recorder, or through the transcription of his improvised lectures and talks from recorded tapes.

Isaiah Berlin is known for his inaugural lecture, "Two Concepts of Liberty," delivered in 1958 as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford.

Isaiah Berlin defined 'negative liberty' as absence of coercion or interference of private actions by an external political body, which Isaiah Berlin derived from the Hobbesian definition of liberty.

Isaiah Berlin contended that modern political thinkers often conflated positive liberty with rational action, based upon a rational knowledge to which, it is argued, only a certain elite or social group has access.

For Isaiah Berlin, values are creations of mankind, rather than products of nature waiting to be discovered.

Isaiah Berlin's argument was partly grounded in Wittgenstein's later theory of language, which argued that inter-translatability was supervenient on a similarity in forms of life, with the inverse implication that our epistemic access to other cultures entails an ontologically contiguous value-structure.

Alan Brown suggests that Isaiah Berlin ignores the fact that values are commensurable in the extent to which they contribute to the human good.

Isaiah Berlin promoted the notion of "positive liberty" in the sense of an intrinsic link between positive freedom and participatory, Athenian-style, democracy.

Isaiah Berlin contributed a number of essays on leading intellectuals and political figures of his time, including Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Chaim Weizmann.

The Isaiah Berlin Room, on the third floor of the library, is a replica of his study at the University of Oxford.