Errol Harris

In 2017, James Schofield submitted his PhD thesis to the University of Canterbury titled Dialectical Holism: The Lost Metaphysics of E. E. Harris. In this work, he argued that Harris not only anticipated but provided a metaphysical framework for unifying a range of current theories across the otherwise disparate special sciences of cosmology, systems biology, and consciousness studies. Perhaps the most important contention in this regard has been that Harris's work provides a neutral monist ontology for the philosophy of mind known as enactivism.

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. 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. He had a home near Ambleside in the Lake District in England since 1963, taking up permanent residence there in his latter years. He died on 21 June 2009 at the age of 101.

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 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).

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.

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

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. He celebrated his 100th birthday in 2008.

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.