Harold Joachim

Harold Henry Joachim (28 May 1868 – 30 July 1938) was a British idealist philosopher. A disciple of Francis Herbert Bradley, whose posthumous papers he edited, Joachim is now identified with the later days of the British idealist movement. He is generally credited with the definitive formulation of the coherence theory of truth, in his book *The Nature of Truth* (1906). He was also a scholar of Aristotle and Spinoza. Born in London, the son of a Hungarian wool merchant, he was educated at Harrow School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a pupil of R. L. Nettleship. He was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Merton College in 1890, and in 1892 became a philosophy lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Returning to Oxford in 1894, he was lecturer at Balliol until becoming a Fellow and Tutor at Merton in 1897. In 1907 he married his first cousin, a daughter of the violinist Joseph Joachim. He became Wykeham Professor of Logic of the University of Oxford from 1919, succeeding John Cook Wilson, and occupied the chair until his death. Whilst at Oxford he taught T.S. Eliot. Joachim was a nephew of the great 19th Century violinist Joseph Joachim, and was himself a talented amateur violinist.