The Isaiah Berlin Lecture
An annual lecture in the History of Ideas
The Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, Wolfson College, Oxford
Open to the public
Previous Isaiah Berlin Lectures:
- 2023 Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias
Coleman:* Black Brummie Schoolboy - 2022 Professor Ato Quayson: Disputatiousness and Unruly Affective Economies: From the Greeks to Postcolonial Tragedy
- 2021 Professor John Tasioulas, Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt and Sir Tim Hitchens: AI and Ethics: The Sense of Reality
- 2019 Paul Gilroy: Liberalism and the Resurgence of Fascism
- 2018 Dr Aileen Kelly: Isaiah Berlin on Liberty
- 2017 Professor Galen Strawson: One Hundred Years of Consciousness (‘A Long Training in Absurdity’)
- 2016 Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah: Cosmopolitan Contamination: Learning World Citizenship
- 2015 Henry Hardy: ‘The Genius and the Pedant: Working with Isaiah Berlin’
- 2014 Onora O'Neill: ‘Pluralism and Human Rights’
- 2013 Alfred Brendel: ‘A Piano Alphabet’
- 2012 Baroness Helena Kennedy, QC: ‘Human Rights and Global Free Markets: Big Ideas in Conflict’
- 2011 Professor Amartya Sen (Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University): ‘Reasoning and Disagreement’
- 2010 Professor Roy Foster (Carroll Professor of Irish History, University of Oxford): ‘Senses of Reality: Writing the Biography of a Revolutionary Generation’
- 2009 Dr James H Billington (Librarian of Congress): ‘A Humanist’s Conversation with the Twentieth Century (Isaiah Berlin, 1909–1997)’
- 2008 Professor Timothy Garton Ash (Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University): ‘Isaiah Berlin and the Challenge of Multiculturalism’: part 1 | part 2
- 2007 Dr Michael Ignatieff (Deputy Leader of the Canadian Liberal Party and MP for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Toronto, Ontario; former Carr Professor of Human Rights Practice, Harvard University): ‘Isaiah Berlin on Political Judgement: Theory versus Practice’
- 2006 Professor Michael Walzer (UPS Foundation Professor, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton): ‘The Paradox of National Liberation: India, Israel, Algeria’
- 2005 His Excellency Dr Jorge Sampaio, President of Portugal: ‘Portugal and Europe: Routes of Change’
- 2004 Sir Tom Stoppard OM: ‘Drawing on the Wall of Plato’s Cave’
- 2003 Professor Avishai Margalit (Professor of Philosophy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem): ‘Compromise and Appeasement: Between Peace and Justice’
- 2002 Dr Eva Hoffman: ‘The Romance of Difference and the Question of Tolerance Today’
- 2001 Professor Jared Diamond (Department of Physiology, University of California at Los Angeles’ School of Medicine): ‘Ecological Collapses of Pre-Industrial Societies’
- 2000 Dr Orlando Figes (Professor of History, Birkbeck College, London): ‘The Cultural Tradition of St Petersburg’
- 1999 Professor Charles Rosen (formerly Professor of Music and Social Thought at the University of Chicago): ‘Tradition without Convention: The Impossible Nineteenth-Century Project’
- 1998 Jonathan Z Smith, (Professor of the Humanities, University of Chicago): ‘Close Encounters of Diverse Kinds’
- 1997 Simon Schama (Professor of Art, History and Archaeology, Columbia University): ‘History and the Literary Imagination’.
- 1996 Conor Cruise O’Brien (Writer & Diplomatist; Pro-Chancellor, University of Dublin): ‘Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson: Mutually Antipathetic Minds’
- 1995 Christopher Ricks (Professor of English, Boston University): ‘Editing Early Eliot’
- 1994 Bernard Williams (White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford): ‘The Liberalism of Fear’
- 1993 Dr Hans Kung (Professor of Ecumenical Theology, University of Tübingen): ‘Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic’
- 1992 Professor Fritz Stern (Professor of History, Columbia University in the City of New York): ‘Historians and the Catastrophes of our Time: Private Experience and Public Explication’
- 1991 (Inaugural Lecture) Professor Stephen Jay Gould (Professor of Geology and Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology, and Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University): ‘Making Sense of the Unpredictable: The Role of History and Contingency in Science’
* Professor Coleman strikes through his last name as his family was given it when they were purchased from Jamaica.