Isaiah Berlin - Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays

CONCEPTS AND CATEGORIES

ISAIAH BERLIN WAS BORN IN RIGA, now capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia; there in 1917, in Petrograd, he witnessed both Revolutions Social Democratic and Bolshevik. In 1921 he and his parents came to England, and he was educated at St Pauls School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

At Oxford he was a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory, and founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy. In addition to Concepts and Categories, his main published works are Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Liberty, The Soviet Mind and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.

Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlins Literary Trustees. He has edited (or co-edited) many other books by Berlin, including the first three of four volumes of his letters, and is currently working on the remaining volume.

Alasdair MacIntyre most recently taught philosophy at Duke University and the University of Notre Dame. He is now a Research Fellow at London Metropolitan University.

For further information about Isaiah Berlin visit http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/

ALSO BY ISAIAH BERLIN

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Karl Marx

The Hedgehog and the Fox

The Age of Enlightenment

Russian Thinkers

Against the Current

Personal Impressions

The Crooked Timber of Humanity

The Sense of Reality

The Proper Study of Mankind

The Roots of Romanticism

The Power of Ideas

Three Critics of the Enlightenment

Freedom and Its Betrayal

Liberty

The Soviet Mind

Political Ideas in the Romantic Age

with Beata Polanowska-Sygulska

Unfinished Dialogue

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Flourishing: Letters 19281946

Enlightening: Letters 19461960

Building: Letters 19601975

CONCEPTS AND
CATEGORIES

PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS

ISAIAH BERLIN

Edited by Henry Hardy
Introduction by Bernard Williams

Second Edition

Foreword by Alasdair MacIntyre

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD

To the memory of J. L. Austin

Austin came to be the most powerful influence in Oxford philosophy, and him I knew very well and very intimately, and he probably had a greater influence on me, at least on what I believed as a philosopher, than anybody else in Oxford at that time.

Isaiah Berlin

Interview with Frans Boenders (2867 below).

but such epigrams do not convey its essence.

[] in the West, in particular during the last 400 years, it has mainly consisted in the critical examination of the most general categories and concepts embedded in mens thought and action, such as true and false, good and bad, same and different, things and persons. One of its most important tasks has been to elicit the presuppositions of the central and most lasting beliefs of human societies in the West, naturally enough, of Western society and the attempt to assess their validity by the use of rational methods; sometimes the assessment of those rational methods themselves by appeals to other sources of knowledge.

The most frequent questions asked in this connection are How do you know? and What does this mean?, as well as the older metaphysical query What is really there and what is mere appearance? These questions can be, and have been, asked in every province of human thought and action, and this is the sense in which philosophy is the most general enquiry there is.

Isaiah Berlin, On Philosophy

Untraced.

Thought is the (silent) conversation of the soul with itself: Plato, Sophist 263e264a. Silent occurs only in the first of two statements of this definition in this passage. Cf. Theaetetus 189e.

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London, 1964), 89 (given as an example of an epigram, whose authorship is not made explicit).

Good Book Guide 8 (Spring 1980), 10.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Alasdair MacIntyre

WHEN IN 1978 ISAIAH BERLIN republished in