Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was a Latvian-born British philosopher, historian of ideas, and public intellectual. Born in Riga and educated at Oxford, he became a fellow of All Souls College and later the first president of Wolfson College. His 1958 lecture Two Concepts of Liberty distinguished negative liberty (freedom from interference) from positive liberty (freedom to act on one's own will), and he defended value pluralism, the view that human ends are many and cannot always be reconciled. He wrote widely on Russian thinkers, the Romantic movement, and the history of ideas, and was knighted in 1957.