Talk:Isaiah Berlin

message: The comment about Berlin's being only the third Jew elected Fellow of an Oxford College needs some qualification (I emended it from the original identification of him as the second Jew to be elected a fellow). Berlin was the third openly Jewish individual to hold a Fellowship at Oxford (and the first openly Jewish individual to be elected a Fellow of All Souls). One of those before him was Samuel Alexander (1859-1938), a professor of philosophy originally from Australia, who was a fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford from 1882-93 (the college is said to have been unaware that he was Jewish when they appointed him). James Joseph Sylvester (1814-97) was technically not elected to a Fellowship; he was appointed the Savilian Professor of Geometry, and by virtue of this became a Professorial fellow of New College, Oxford. Berlin was preceeded at All Souls by Leopold Stennet Amery, whose mother was born Jewish, but had converted to Protestantism; Amery was not raised a Jew, and hid his Jewish ancestry (although an opponent of anti-Semitism and Nazism and strong supporter of Zionism himself, his son, John Amery, bizarrely and sadly became a Nazi sympathizer, and was executed for treason after World War II).
:All this talk about Jewish fellows at Oxford is caused by post-War guilt. English and 
:German attitudes towards Jews have been similar or identical for centuries. The British Aliens Act of 1905 was intended to keep Jews out. Similar legislation applied to America.
::That must be why the British took so many Jews before WW II then when other countries where barring them entry; Kindertransport.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.144.50.163 (talk) 07:46, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Jewish fellows at Oxford

message: It would be nice to see an improved summation of his very important work on "Two Concepts of Liberty".  The paragraph in this article is turgid and not very informative. DonPMitchell (talk) 22:07, 30 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The para in its current form, as of today, is actually quite misleading. It makes it sound as if Berlin is more a fan of positive liberty than of negative liberty - the opposite is more the case, although Berlin would doubtless have thought this also oversimplifies his position. It would be true to say that he promoted the distinction between positive liberty and negative liberty (though he repeatedly claimed not to have invented this distinction). I won't make this change at this stage, as I haven't read the references given, but I've read a lot of Berlin's work and, over the years, much secondary commentary on it. There's really no doubt about this point. As for his associating positive liberty with French thinkers and negative liberty with British thinkers (or something along those lines) this massively oversimplifies. Indeed, he attributes the first clear recognition and explication of what is now called negative liberty to the French liberal thinker Benjamin Constant. He does, indeed, give examples of other French thinkers (especially Rousseau) whom he associates with positive liberty, but the current statement in the article sounds far more crude than anything Berlin ever wrote or thought. Metamagician3000 (talk) 10:01, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explicitly argues the opposite as well, highlighting Berlin's statements in their definition and review of negative liberty in their article on Liberalism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/#NegLib 2001:638:504:D804:D808:62E0:2794:C797 (talk) 08:55, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Positive and Negative Liberty 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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message: Anna Akhmatova has written a collection of poems dedicated to Berlin…. Worth to mention? 2A01:E34:EC55:FE20:3DC9:C85A:4E65:2B5E (talk) 12:54, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anna Akhmatova