Errol Harris was a greatly respected and influential philosopher and public intellectual in North America, Britain and Europe in the 20th century. His autobiography provides insight into the influences that contributed to the shaping of his remarkable character and career. In these recollections Harris reveals a keen eye as he presents memories of growing up in several parts of South Africa in the early 20th century; childhood and youth in a close-knit but sometimes financially challenged Jewish family (...) of fairly strict religious observance; an account of inspiring intellectual experiences as an undergraduate and graduate at Rhodes College, Grahamstown (1925-29); teaching black South African university undergraduates at Fort Hare in 1929-30; studying philosophy at Oxford (1931-33) with many of the most celebrated figures on the Oxford faculty from that period; teaching at British public schools in the mid-1930’s; a short, unhappy, but adventure-filled stint as secretary to the Minister of Mines for Southern Rhodesia; tales of his experiences as an Education Officer for the British Colonial Service, inspecting remote village schools on horseback in Basutoland and Zanzibar in the late 1930’s, just prior to the outbreak of the war. He also recounts the religious experiences over these years that eventually led him to join the Church of England. Over the course of his long life, Errol demonstrated a serious concern for the common weal, along with a strongly-developed social conscience. Confronted with a range of historic challenges, including some of the most acute evils arising in the course of the twentieth century, he met the most serious of them head-on with a direct, resolute, and public response, calling upon all to embark on a path of sanity and reason toward a goal of mutual well-being. The book also covers his research and his writing of his fully realized and comprehensive philosophical system on the concept of mind, or consciousness, and its relation to the world. Excerpted from the Introduction. (shrink)

Professor Errol E. Harris, past-President of The Hegel Society of America, accepted the invitation of the Philosophy Department of Villanova University to occupy their Chair of Christian Philosophy for the 1982 spring semester. The following paper was presented as his inaugural address to that department.

In his review of Phillip Grier’s anthology, Dialectic and Contemporary Science, Darrel Christensen expresses his regret that I “did not find occasion… to give more attention… to the sorts of well-informed and pointed criticism that E. McMullin raised.. in ‘Is the Progress of Science Dialectical?’” In that book it would hardly have been possible or appropriate, for me to have done so, because I did not write it, and although the editor invited me to respond to the authors who contributed, (...) Ernan McMullin was not one of them. The paper to which Christensen refers was presented to the first meeting of the Hegel Society of America in 1970, at which I was present; but after so long an interval of time I cannot now remember if or how, I responded to it. So far as my recollection serves, my own paper, although distributed to those attending the meeting, was not read and was not fully discussed. So there may well be some need for taking up Christensen’s challenge, even at this late hour. (shrink)

1 My first teacher of philosophy, at what is now Rhodes University in South Africa, was Arthur R. Lord, a man who deserves to be well known, though today few people will ever have heard of him. He was himself a pupil of J.A. Smith and E.F. Carritt at Oxford in the early years of this century, during the heyday of British Idealism. In 1911 he won the Green Moral Philosophy Prize with a voluminous dissertation on the passions, which I (...) read in typescript when I was a student, but which was never published and disappeared after his death in 1940. (shrink)

The vagaries of the postal system, British or American, or both, apparently, have prevented until now by seeing Professor Hodgson’s complaints about my review of his and his colleagues’ translation of Part 3 of the Religionsphilosophie. I am dismayed and not a little surprised that he should have taken my comments so amiss, for I had not the least intention of suggesting anything but that their translation was admirable, and that the immense work they had accomplished was a very valuable (...) contribution to the subject. I thought I had made that clear. The use of the phrase “liberties taken with the text” was, perhaps, unfortunate, but to say that it was “a careless and irresponsible misrepresentation” is surely rather extreme. For what translator trying to put Hegel’s involved and involuted German into readable and intelligible English can avoid taking liberties with the text? One of the best and most gifted, William Wallace, takes liberties in almost every sentence, yet succeeds in great measure in conveying Hegel’s thought correctly and in lucid English. (shrink)

F. H. Bradley was a self-confessed idealist, but as there is no clear consensus concerning just what idealism is, the term has been applied to a wide variety of doctrines, many of which Bradley repudiated. Solipsism, the view that all and the only reality consists of the content of my consciousness, is rejected by the vast majority of idealists, and by Bradley in particular on the grounds that direct experience affords no clear conception of a self, and so far as (...) it gives any at all it is already in correlation with a not-self. If direct experience is to be transcended we may as legitimately conclude to materialism as to “idealism”; and nothing in experience, whether direct or indirect, proves that immediate feeling is confined to my self. In Ethical Studies he refers to the view that material things and other people are merely ideas in the mind of the thinker as “a silly doctrine,” and asks how the solipsist would answer the questions: Is my consciousness something that goes beyond myself; and if so in what sense? and Had I a father? What do I mean by that, and how do I reconcile my assertion of it with my answer to question? Whatever our reaction to these criticisms, they give clear evidence that Bradley rejected what he took to be solipsism, the argument of which he states as follows: “I cannot transcend experience and experience must be my experience. From this it follows that nothing beyond myself exists; for what is experience is its states.” Solipsism is the most extreme version of idealism, but for all idealists the crucial question remains whether their theories do not in the end reduce to something very like it; and if they do, they cannot be accepted, because solipsism is a patent self-contradiction, in that it reduces to the self what the very conception of a self must exclude from it. To this issue we shall have to return; let us meanwhile consider further what idealism meant for Bradley. (shrink)

The category of being-for-self is central for the whole of Hegel's system. It is the category of wholeness, what Hegel calls the true infinite; and, in the preface to the Phänomenologie he has identified the truth as the whole in its self-generation, which is what the entire system of his philosophy presents. The exposition of this category in the Logic is therefore of singular importance, yet it is by no means easy to follow. Although we may be able to understand (...) how Hegel reaches this category, how it emerges from determinate being, the subcategories into which it evolves, and the transition to quantity that it presages, present nosmall difficulty. (shrink)

The Coherence Theory of Truth does not stand upon its own feet; it is the corollary of a metaphysic, without which it has no claim to credence and is without cogency. Likewise, no critique of the theory can have weight against it if it merely assumes an incompatible metaphysic which it does not validate and unless it can demonstrate the falsity of that on which the Coherence Theory rests. If metaphysics is simply a matter of taste and temperament discussion and (...) criticism become futile, but that metaphysics is simply a matter of taste and sentiment is an exploded doctrine. It can obviously not be maintained because it rests upon a metaphysic in its turn, for it follows from the belief that the world and the human mind are such that we can acquire knowledge of facts originally only through particular sense impressions which can never by their nature convey to us ultimate general truths about reality. This is a metaphysical presupposition and is thus incompetent to extrude metaphysics from the sphere of rational knowledge. (shrink)

One of Kant’s major contributions to modern philosophy was the recognition that genuine knowledge is never a mere patchwork of items of information, whether gathered from empirical sources or from intellectual, whether inductively inferred or deductively derived from first principles. “If each and every single representation were completely foreign, isolated and separate from every other,” he declared, “nothing would ever arise such as knowledge, which is a whole of related and connected elements.” Of this fact, Hegel was unshakably convinced. “The (...) Truth,” he maintained, “is the whole”; but it is no undifferentiated, featureless whole, no Schellingian night in which all cows are black. “The true form in which the truth exists can only be the scientific system itself”. (shrink)

The term ‘Empiricism’ has had at least two different, though not unconnected, applications in modern thought, one to scientific method and the other to philosophical theory. My intention in this lecture is to try to show that, while these two applications of the term have a common source, their actual referents are widely divergent and in large measure even mutually incompatible.

The paper by Hans-Christian Lucas on “The ‘Sovereign Ingratitude’ of Spirit toward Nature” in The Owl of Minerva, 23, 2 : 131-150, is of special interest, if only because, as Lucas says, the transition from nature to spirit is as important for Hegel as is the much criticized transition from the logic to nature. Moreover, the section on anthropology in the Geistesphilosophie is unique, difficult, and much neglected by commentators. My own interest in it dates back longer than I can (...) remember, but Lucas does not seem to be aware of my paper on the subject. He, however, has had access to more recent texts than were at that time at my disposal, from which he cites helpful passages. On these sources I am not in a position to comment, but I should like here to address afresh some of the points bearing on complaints Lucas makes against Hegel’s lack of argument and failure to demonstrate the links between the stages of the dialectic. (shrink)

The need for objective standards of judgement is acutely felt in the bewilderment created by the world situation of our time, a bewilderment that is partly the result of the rapid advance of the natural sciences, with its profound effects upon metaphysical doctrines, religious beliefs and moral attitudes, and partly due to the intractable problems which have arisen in social and political fields. The progress of the sciences, while it seems to have given us secure knowledge of the world about (...) us, has, at the same time, undermined confidence in the criteria of belief and judgement in the conduct of affairs which hitherto had served to guide mankind. Bereft of these the majority of men are unable to see a clear way through the complexities of modern political and economic life and are overwhelmed by the major problems that confront them. As examples of the major perplexities with which mankind is faced today, I shall mention only three:—. (shrink)

No author could fail to be grateful for so considerate and thoughtful a review of his book as Professor di Giovanni has written of mine in the Spring 1985 Owl, with its generous praise in the first paragraph. But I am somewhat bewildered by his description of my interpretation of Hegel as “foreign.” To whom is it foreign? I ask myself. Clearly, from what di Giovanni says, it is not foreign to the British idealists and their epigoni. Is it foreign (...) to Americans, and if so, to which? Is it foreign to Germans? - surely not to such as Rudiger Bubner, with whom I usually find myself in close agreement. Is it foreign to Hegel? - if so, then I have certainly failed in my avowed purpose. (shrink)

Not unexpectedly, the October meeting of the Society at The Pennsylvania State University proved to be most enjoyable. The host institution, known for many years as a center of Hegelian scholarship, provided the Society with every opportunity and facility for the success of its meeting. The modern conference center, and its staff, was efficient without any sacrifice of cordiality. Certainly every member who attended the meeting and there were about one hundred, will recall the pleasant reception and banquet - both (...) of which were held in the attractive Nittany Lion Inn. Professor Joseph Kockelmans, as local chairman, has earned the gratitude of the Society. The book-display, organized by Kevin M. Clark, was both extensive and informative. (shrink)

As in Düsseldorf in 1978, so in Montreal in 1983, the Hegel Society of America held a fringe meeting. But this last time it was more ambitious and more fully organized, a session lasting throughout the day of August 24. Lawrence Stepelevich opened the proceedings with a brief report of the development of the Owl from a nestling into a full-fledged journal. He then introduced the speakers on the subject: “The Trials of the Absolute Spirit.”.

The resignation from the editorship of the Owl by Frederick Weiss is news that will be received with much regret by all members of the Hegel Society and with dismay by quite a few. Under Rick’s direction the Owl has become something more than a simple news letter. Rather, I think we may claim that it is a distinguished and much valued organ of Hegelian studies in America and elsewhere, even despite its modest dimensions. From this source we have had (...) news, not only of the Society and its members, but of everything of interest and concern to Hegelian scholarship; and not only news, but also views and opinions about current literature and translations from the foremost Hegelian shcolars. Just how important a publication the paper has become was immediately felt when Rick’s predicament that led to his resignation resulted in a back-log and delays in the appearance of the newsletter. The Society’s Treasurer was at once inundated with inquiries about, and anxious requests for, forthcoming numbers, both from Libraries and from individuals. (shrink)

Following kant, idealists establish the transcendental unity of the subject as the prior condition of experience of objects. this is necessarily all-inclusive and the finite self becomes one of its phenomena, which cannot be identified with the transcendental ego, nor yet be wholly divorced from it. this is the basis of kant's paralogism of reason. t h green, f h bradley and edmund husserl are all victims of this paralogism, each in his own way. green fails to avoid it by (...) identifying the transcendental subject with the divine spiritual principle; bradley, admitting the problem's insolubility, propounds an incoherent theory of finite centers of experience; and husserl's device of 'mundanization' proves illegitimate and ambiguous under inspection. (shrink)

This is an English translation of Schelling's Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, one of the most significant works in the German tradition of philosophy of nature and early nineteenth-century philosophy of science. It stands in opposition to the Newtonian picture of matter as constituted by inert, impenetrable particles, and argues instead for matter as an equilibrium of active forces that engage in dynamic polar opposition to one another. In the revisions of 1803 Schelling incorporated this dialectical view into a (...) neo-Platonic conception of an original unity divided upon itself. The text is of more than simply historical interest: its daring and original vision of nature, philosophy, and empirical science will prove absorbing reading for all philosophers concerned with post-Kantian German idealism, for scholars of German Romanticism, and for historians of science. (shrink)