13 Facts About Errol Harris

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

Errol E Harris was born on 19 February 1908 in Kimberley, South Africa, to parents who had emigrated from Leeds, England.

Errol Harris 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.

Errol Harris was succeeded as Chief Instructor by Huw Wheldon, later Managing Director of the BBC; another Instructor was Capt.

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

Errol Harris died on 21 June 2009 at the age of 101.

Errol Harris argued for the cogency, truth, and timeliness of Hegel's speculative logic in An Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel.

Errol 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 Errol 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.

Finally, Errol 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.

Errol 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.

Errol Harris argues that Spinoza's polemic against the final causes ought to be understood as referring only to the standpoint of external teleology, and consequently that Spinoza does not exclude a valid explanation of natural processes in the light of an inner teleology.

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