Aileen Kelly, Emerita Reader at King's College, Cambridge, gave the 2018 annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture at Wolfson College, Oxford. The lecture, which was given on November 8th, was introduced by Sir Tim Hitchens. Although for most of his professional lifetime Isaiah Berlin was commonly classified not under his original label as a philosopher but as a historian of ideas, he is now regarded internationally as a philosopher of continuing importance because of his distinctive contributions to our understanding of the philosophical problems associated with liberty and pluralism. The first aim of the lecture is to show how both points of view can be correct at the same time: without the historical understanding he obtained from his study of thinkers in several countries and centuries and how their orientations depended on period and historical context, he would not have had such a substantial base for the philosophical position that he reached. It will then be argued in detail that the most significant of the various influences on his thought came from a direction - Russia in the nineteenth century - that there has been a regrettable recent tendency to ignore, and that the most characteristic representative of that influence on both his pluralism and his attitude to liberty was the publicist, journalist, publisher, author and thinker Alexander Herzen.
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Aileen Kelly, Emerita Reader at King's College, Cambridge, gave the 2018 annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture at Wolfson College, Oxford. The lecture, which was given on November 8th, was introduced by Sir Tim Hitchens. Although for most of his professional lifetime Isaiah Berlin was commonly classified not under his original label as a philosopher but as a historian of ideas, he is now regarded internationally as a philosopher of continuing importance because of his distinctive contributions to our understanding of the philosophical problems associated with liberty and pluralism. The first aim of the lecture is to show how both points of view can be correct at the same time: without the historical understanding he obtained from his study of thinkers in several countries and centuries and how their orientations depended on period and historical context, he would not have had such a substantial base for the philosophical position that he reached. It will then be argued in detail that the most significant of the various influences on his thought came from a direction - Russia in the nineteenth century - that there has been a regrettable recent tendency to ignore, and that the most characteristic representative of that influence on both his pluralism and his attitude to liberty was the publicist, journalist, publisher, author and thinker Alexander Herzen.
One Hundred Years of Consciousness ('a long training in absurdity')
The Isaiah Berlin Lecture
52 minutes
8 years ago
One Hundred Years of Consciousness ('a long training in absurdity')
Galen Strawson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford deliverd the 2017 Isaiah Berlin Lecture at Wolfson College. The lecture was introduced by the College President, Hermione Lee. There occurred in the twentieth century the most remarkable episode in the whole history of ideas-the whole history of human thought. A number of thinkers denied the existence of something we know with certainty to exist: consciousness, conscious experience. Others held back from the Denial, but claimed that it might be true-a claim no less remarkable than the Denial. It is instructive to document some aspects of this episode, with particular reference to the rise of philosophical behaviourism, and the (connected) rise of a conception of naturalism that transformed the doctrine of materialism from a consciousness affirming-view into a consciousness-denying view. There is then a further task: to try to explain how it is possible that intelligent human beings should come to deny the existence of something that certainly exists.
The Isaiah Berlin Lecture
Aileen Kelly, Emerita Reader at King's College, Cambridge, gave the 2018 annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture at Wolfson College, Oxford. The lecture, which was given on November 8th, was introduced by Sir Tim Hitchens. Although for most of his professional lifetime Isaiah Berlin was commonly classified not under his original label as a philosopher but as a historian of ideas, he is now regarded internationally as a philosopher of continuing importance because of his distinctive contributions to our understanding of the philosophical problems associated with liberty and pluralism. The first aim of the lecture is to show how both points of view can be correct at the same time: without the historical understanding he obtained from his study of thinkers in several countries and centuries and how their orientations depended on period and historical context, he would not have had such a substantial base for the philosophical position that he reached. It will then be argued in detail that the most significant of the various influences on his thought came from a direction - Russia in the nineteenth century - that there has been a regrettable recent tendency to ignore, and that the most characteristic representative of that influence on both his pluralism and his attitude to liberty was the publicist, journalist, publisher, author and thinker Alexander Herzen.
