Errol Eustace Harris (1908-) is a contemporary South African philosopher. His work has focused on developing a systematic and coherent account of the logic, metaphysics, and epistemology implicit in contemporary understanding of the world. Harris holds that, in conjunction with empirical science, the Western philosophical tradition, in its commitment to the ideal of reason, contains the resources necessary to accomplish this end.

Life

Errol E. Harris was born on February 19, 1908 in Kimberley, South Africa, to parents who had emigrated from England. His father, Samuel Jack Harris, had been one of the defenders of Kimberley when he was besieged there (together with Cecil Rhodes) during the Boer War. Errol studied philosophy at Rhodes University College in South Africa and at the University of Oxford, where he obtained a B.Litt. degree with a thesis on Samuel Alexander and Alfred North Whitehead.

After serving as an education officer for the British Colonial Service and as a Major in the British Army during World War II, he received his PhD in philosophy from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1950, where he became a full professor in 1953. His first important philosophical work, Nature,Mind and Modern Science, appeared in 1954. In 1956 Harris went to the United States to lecture at Yale University and Connecticut College, where he was subsequently appointed Professor of Philosophy. This allowed his philosophical activity to prosper unimpeded and gain growing recognition.

From 1959-1960 he was Acting Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University in Scotland, and then returned to Connecticut College. In 1962 he became Roy Roberts Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, and in 1966 Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, where he was later named John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy and where he taught until his retirement in 1976. After retirement he taught as a visiting Professor at Marquette, Villanova and Emory Universities and was an honorary research fellow at the Centre for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. He was President of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1968-9 and President of the Hegel Society of America in 1977-8.

Philosophical work

During his years at Kansas and Northwestern Harris's major publications included The Foundation of Metaphysics in Science (1965) and Hypothesis and Perception: The Roots of Scientific Method (1970). He has also had an abiding historiographic interest in the metaphysics of Baruch Spinoza and G.W.F. Hegel. Spinoza's philosophy is reconstructed, interpreted, and appropriated by Harris in Salvation from Despair: A Reappraisal of Spinoza's Philosophy (1973). He argued for the cogency, truth, and timelineness of Hegel's speculative logic in An Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel (1983). In retirement his philosophical activity continued uninterrupted, giving rise to numerous articles and volumes, including Formal,Transcendental and Dialectical Thinking: Logic and Reality (1987).

Harris holds the epistemological position that philosophical empiricism was insuperably inconsistent in every version found in European thought from Locke to the twentieth-century analytic philosophers.^[1] The verification principle, upon which empiricism is grounded, is held by Harris to be intrinsically false because sense perception is devoid of immediate self-evidence, depending on an interpretative context that is a product of thinking's discursive activity. Furthermore, the verification principle is also unable to account for the empiricist epistemologist's claim to truth for his own doctrine. Empiricism's "fallacy" is that "of propounding a theory of knowledge from which, if it is true, the theorist himself must be exempt, and which, if it applies to the theorist himself, must be false".^{[citation needed]} Nor is empiricism able successfully to overcome the logical antinomies infecting the inductive method, by which it usually tries to explain and justify the genesis and validity of the universal form of scientific theories. Finally, Harris argued that the hypothetico-deductive method, which some empiricists such as Sir Karl Popper employ in order to overcome the shortcomings of the inductive method, is epistemologically unfruitful, owing to its merely analytic and conjectural nature. The peculiar character and interest of Harris’s critique of philosophical empiricism, however, lies in the fact that he does not confine himself to refuting it in a purely logico-immanent way, but also effectively shows that a careful examination of the theoretical results achieved by contemporary physics, biology, and experimental psychology, as well as of the peculiar procedures of scientific enquiry and discovery, concordantly proves that it is not even in harmony with the specific orientation of contemporary science. Science supports a world view that is relativistic, holistic, organicistic, teleological and hierarchical in character, and therefore flatly contradicts the (unconfessed) atomistic, mechanical, and pluralistic metaphysical presuppositions of formal and mathematical logic, wrongly privileged by philosophical empiricism.

Selected bibliography

As author

• Cosmos and Anthropos
• Cosmos and Theos
• The Foundations of Metaphysics in Science (1965)
• Nature,Mind,and Modern Science (1954)
• Hypothesis and Perception (1970)
• The Spirit of Hegel
• The Substance of Spinoza
• The Reality of Time
• Formal,Transcendental and Dialectical Thinking (1987)
• An Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel (1983)
• The Problem of Evil
• Atheism and Theism
• Perceptual Assurance and the Reality of the World
• Salvation from Despair, A Reapraisal of Spinoza's Philosophy (1973)
• Fundamentals of Philosophy
• Analysis and Insight
• Revelation Through Reason
• South African Survey
• Reflections on the Problem of Consciousness
• White Civilization
• The Survival of Political Man, A Study in the Principles of International Order
• Annihilation and Utopia
• Apocalypse and Paradigm
• One World or None
• Earth Federation Now!

Harris is also the author of over ninety published articles and chapters of books, the earliest of which appeared in 1936.

As editor and co-editor

• Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind by the late Harold Joachim (reconstructed from notes taken by his students - Prof. Joachim was formerly Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford)
• Towards Genuine Global Governance : Critical Reactions to 'Our Global Neighborhood' (co-editor with James A. Yunker)
• The History of Philosophy from Descartes to Hegelby the late Arthur Ritchie Lord (co-edited, with commentaries and annotations, with William Sweet)
• A Reprint Edition of 'The Principles of Politics' by Arthur Ritchie Lord Together with a Critical Assessment (co-edited, with commentaries and annotations, with William Sweet) *Foundational Problems in Philosophy by the late Arthur Ritchie Lord (co-edited, with commentaries and annotations, with William Sweet)

As co-translator

Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. (co-translator with Prof. Peter Heath)

Notes