Isaiah Berlin's celebrated radio lectures on six formative anti-liberal thinkers were broadcast by the BBC in 1952. They are published here for the first time, fifty years later. They comprise one of Berlin's earliest and most convincing expositions of his views on human freedom and on the history of ideas--views that later found expression in such famous works as "Two Concepts of Liberty," and were at the heart of his lifelong work on the Enlightenment and its critics. Working (...) with BBC transcripts and Berlin's annotated drafts, Henry Hardy has recreated these lectures, which consolidated the forty-three-year-old Berlin's growing reputation as a man who could speak about intellectual matters in an accessible and involving way. In his lucid examination of sometimes complex ideas, Berlin demonstrates that a balanced understanding and a resilient defense of human liberty depend on learning both from the errors of freedom's alleged defenders and from the dark insights of its avowed antagonists. This book throws light on the early development of Berlin's most influential ideas and supplements his already published writings with fuller treatments of Helve;tius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, and Saint-Simon, with the ultra-conservative Maistre bringing up the rear. These thinkers gave to freedom a new dimension of power--power that, Berlin argues, has historically brought about less, not more, individual liberty. These lectures show Berlin at his liveliest and most torrentially spontaneous, testifying to his talents as a teacher of rare brilliance and impact. Listeners tuned in expectantly each week to the hour-long broadcasts and found themselves mesmerized by Berlin's astonishingly fluent extempore style. One listener, a leading historian of ideas who was then a schoolboy, was to recount that the lectures "excited me so much that I sat, for every talk, on the floor beside the wireless, taking notes." This excitement is at last recreated here for all to share. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin; I—The Presidential Address: “From Hope and Fear Set Free”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 64, Issue 1, 1 June 1964, Pages 1–30.

Isaiah Berlin; I—The Presidential Address: “From Hope and Fear Set Free”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 64, Issue 1, 1 June 1964, Pages 1–30.

Stremlenie k idealu -- Chuvstvo realʹnosti -- Estestvennai︠a︡ li nauka istorii︠a︡? -- Dva ponimanii︠a︡ svobody -- Dzhambattista Viko i istorii︠a︡ kulʹtury -- Zhozef de Mestr i istoki fashizma -- Protivniki prosveshchenii︠a︡ -- Nat︠s︡ionalizm : vcherashnee upushchenie i segodni︠a︡shni︠a︡i︠a︡ sila -- Marksizm i Internat︠s︡ionala v XIX veke.

Giambattista Vico fue un pensador audaz, original e importante. Vico es el padre de una nueva visión del papel del mito, de los rituales y del lenguaje. [...] Me gustaría decir por qué creo que merece la pena leer a Vico, y por qué hoy es de alguna manera mejor conocido de lo que lo fue en períodos previos. Su nombre, contrariamente al de aquellos otros grandes creadores, no está unido a un único descubrimiento que haga época, aunque hubiera adelantado (...) muchas ideas de gran audacia y originalidad. [...] Propuso una nueva visión de la naturaleza humana entendida en términos sociales, como algo que crece y se transforma. Nos hizo ser conscientes de la necesidad de utilizar la imaginación disciplinada por la investigación empírica con el fin de entender las instituciones de otras gentes que son en gran medida diferentes a nosotros, de "adentrarnos en sus mentes", como así dice [...].En muchos sentidos, a Vico cabe razonablemente considerarle como el padre de la historia cultural.Giambattista Vico was an audacius, original and important thinker. Vico is the father of new view of the role of myth, of ritual and of langauge. [...] I should say why I think Vico is worth reading at all, and why he is somewhat better known today than at some previous periods. His name, unlike those of other grear originators, is not attached to one single, epoch-making discovery, for he put forward many ideas of great boldness and originality. [...] He propounded a new view of human nature, conceived in social terms, as something which grows and transforms itself. He made us aware of the need to use imagination disciplined by empirical research in order to understand the institutions of people greately different from ourselves, to "enter the minds" of such beings, as he puts it. In many ways Vico can reasonabley be regarded as the father of cultural history. (shrink)

I. Einheit und Vielheit.--II. Sein und Werden, mit einem Epilog zum Ganzen.

Colour word usage within languages follows the same ordering as that proposed by Berlin and Kay between languages. This provides additional validation and support for Berlin and Kay's schema.

The text of Kant’s first dissertation is a translation from Latin from an academic publication of a collection of Kant’s works: Kant, I. Meditationum quarundam de igne succincta delineatio... In: Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed., 1910. Kants Gesammelte Schriften. 1. Abhandling: Werke. Band I: Vorkritische Schriften I, 1747-1756. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1910, pp. 369-384. The publication is available at https://korpora.zim.uni-duisburg- essen.de/kant/aa01/ [Accessed 10 March 2019]. Pagination and illustrations are from the same publication, the page numbers are in square (...) brackets at the beginning of the page. Page footnotes, if indicated, draw on the commentaries of Lewis White Beck, the translator of the dissertation into English from the following edition: Kant, I., 2012. Natur­al Science, edited by E. Watkins, translated by L. W. Beck, J. B. Edwards, O. Reinhardt, M. Schönfeld and E. Watkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 713-714. It was important for the translator to follow the course of Kant’s thought and as far as possible preserve his style, including recurring words. Natural science terminology keeps as close as possible to the dissertation text, so instead of the term “gas”, which Kant does not use, the translator resorts to a loan-translation “elastic liquid,” harking back to the Russian term упругая жидкость which was proposed by Mikhail V. Lomonosov but did not catch on. For the same reason the translator uses the loan translation “moment” instead of the more common “motive force”. “Gradus”, however, is always translated as “degree” for the sake of uniformity. All the translator’s additions to the Kantian text are within square brackets. When the meaning of a word is translated in a form that departs from the original meaning due to context the Latin original is attached within round brackets in the grammatical form used by Kant. To facilitate understanding, long compound sentences of the Kantian text are sometimes broken up into several simple sentences. The structure of the text and title page format have been preserved. The translator would like to express sincere gratitude to Alexei N. Krouglov and Svyatopolk N. Yeschenko for their valuable advice, remarks and help and support in preparing this publication. (shrink)

Summary The aim of this paper is to analyse the scientific relations between Germany and Spain during the Entente Boycott (1919–1926) and the German academic policy that fostered it. The study of the international relations of German science during the 1920s has been carried out using as a basis the archives of scientific institutions. Personal initiatives by individual scientists to establish relations have therefore not been taken into account. The relations between the scientific communities of Germany and Spain during the (...) 1920s indicate the importance of such personal relationships and from their transcendence at a political level. They also offer an example of how political strategies could dictate the politics of academic recognition. This paper is based on the analysis of sources found at the Foreign Office Archives in Berlin. It gives us a clear idea about the role of scientific relationships between the two countries in shaping their scientific policies. (shrink)

Saunders & van Brakel's criticism of Berlin & Kay's methodology misunderstands the fact that scientific hypotheses are tested by generating new, replicable data with novel explanatory power. Thus, although Berlin and Kay studied differences in colour words between languages, the same patterns are also present in colour word usage within languages, in a range of literary and other textual databases.

With B. M. Pap. 273 , which consists of a number of fragments from a papyrus book containing an unknown epic on the subject of Dionysus and his Indian expedition, is bound up a small fragment, evidently by a different hand. This I have recently identified as from the Phaenomena of Aratus; and I therefore publish it here. Apparently no papyrus fragment of this poem has yet been discovered; there is, however, at Berlin a portion of a commentary on (...) Aratus, which has been published by Maass in his Commentariorum in Aratum Reliquiae, Berlin, 1898, pp. 556–558. (shrink)