Errol Harris

Errol Eustace Harris (19 February 1908 – 21 June 2009), sometimes cited as E. E. Harris, was a South African philosopher.

His work focused on developing a systematic and coherent account of the logic, metaphysics, and epistemology implicit in contemporary understanding of the world.

Harris held 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.

Errol E. Harris was born on 19 February 1908 in Kimberley, South Africa, to parents who had emigrated from Leeds, 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 in South Africa, where he was a student of A.R. Lord and where he obtained his B.A. and M.A., and at the University of Oxford, where he obtained a B.Litt.

degree with a thesis on Samuel Alexander and Alfred North Whitehead.

He served as an education officer for the British Colonial Service, and during World War II was Chief Instructor of the Middle East Military Education College at Mt. Carmel, Palestine, with the rank of Major in the Education Corps of the British Army.

He was succeeded as Chief Instructor by Huw Wheldon, later Managing Director of the BBC; another Instructor was Capt. Michael Stewart, later Foreign Secretary in Harold Wilson's government, and subsequently Baron Stewart of Fulham.

Errol Harris received his D. Litt.

in philosophy from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1950, where he was secretary, and then president, of the lecturers' association.

He became a full professor there in 1953.

He served on the executive of the South African Race Relations Board with Chief Luthuli, the Zulu paramount chief, and in this capacity came to know Oliver Tambo (Nelson Mandela's law partner, who succeeded Mandela as president of the ANC.), who advised the Board of the ANC's stand on various issues.

Harris's first important philosophical work, Nature, Mind and Modern Science, appeared in 1954.

In 1956 he 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 to 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.

He had a home near Ambleside in the Lake District in England since 1963, taking up permanent residence there in his latter years.

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.

At the World Congress of Philosophy in Vienna in 1968, he chaired the meeting that established the International Society for Metaphysics.

After retirement he taught as a visiting professor at Carleton College, Marquette, Villanova (as Distinguished Professor of Christian Philosophy) 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 1969 (and in 1985 was awarded the Society's Paul Weiss Medal for the outstanding contribution to Metaphysics), and President of the Hegel Society of America in 1977–8.

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 timeliness 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.

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".

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.

Harris does not limit himself to refuting empiricism in a purely logico-immanent way, but also argues that a careful examination of the theoretical results achieved by contemporary physics, biology, and experimental psychology, as well as of the procedures of scientific enquiry, reveals that empiricism is not even in harmony with the specific orientation of contemporary science.

He concludes that science supports a world-view that is relativistic, holistic, organicistic, teleological and hierarchical in character—a world-view contradicted by the unconfessed atomistic, mechanical, and pluralistic metaphysical presuppositions of formal and mathematical logic that are wrongly privileged by philosophical empiricism.

Harris maintains that the temporal variation of different metaphysical doctrines cannot be regarded as a procession of discontinuous, subjective opinions whose validity, at best, is confined to particular epochs.

On the contrary, he asserts the existence of "eternal problems in philosophy" and conceives their historical development as a unique, logically necessary, teleological process through which they progressively achieve more coherent and adequate formulations.

Philosophical historiography, therefore, should not simply confine itself to registering the external philological characteristics of the doctrines under consideration without making value judgements about them.

He celebrated his 100th birthday in 2008.

He died on 21 June 2009 at the age of 101.