Harold Henry Joachim was born in London, the son of a wool merchant who had come to England as a young man from
Hungary. 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 the realist
John Cook Wilson, and occupied the chair until his death. Whilst at Oxford he taught the American poet
T.S. Eliot. Joachim was a nephew of the great 19th Century violinist
Joseph Joachim, and was himself a talented amateur violinist. ==Legacy==