​In memoriam Professor Errol E. Harris

Renewed from November 1, 2009

By Moristotle

With somewhat of a shock, I discovered a few minutes ago that the man who said the most flattering thing that I can remember anyone’s ever saying to me died only five months ago. Born the same month as my mother (February 1908), Professor Errol E. Harris died this past June, at age one hundred and one! (My mother died in 2005, not long before her ninety-seventh birthday.)
    Here’s the opening paragraph of Wikipedia’s entry on Errol Harris:

Errol Eustace Harris (February 19, 1908 – June 21, 2009) was a contemporary 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.

My reading this year has been curiously interconnected. In Frank Harris’ memoir, My Life and Loves, I read a good deal of his dealings with Cecil Rhodes, whose money founded the university in South Africa from which Professor Harris earned his bachelor’s degree. Then, in the course of reading Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, I learned that Professor Harris had himself written books on Spinoza: Salvation from Despair, A Reappraisal of Spinoza's Philosophy (1973), Spinoza's Philosophy, an Outline (1992), and The Substance of Spinoza (1995). These books are of course now on my reading list.
    When I googled Harris, not remotely imagining that he could still survive, I was actually trying to find out how I might contact his son for information about his father. I talked with the son at Berkshire School in Massachusetts in 1964 or 1965. The chess team of which he was a member had come to Berkshire School for a match. This was before I ever heard of Errol Harris. His son told me that his father was a professor of philosophy (at the time at the University of Kansas). 
    Anyway, after that year teaching (mainly geometry) at Berkshire School, a semester as a “divinity student” at New College in the University of Edinburgh (when I still believed that such studies had a subject matter), and a semester teaching (English and driver education) in the high school in California from which I’d graduated, I found myself (with my new wife) in Evanston, Illinois, me to begin a doctoral degree program in philosophy at Northwestern University and her to begin the arduous task of being a graduate student’s wife. 
    Professor Harris was new there too that fall semester of 1966, and I took his course in the philosophy of science. At the end of the semester, when we met to discuss a paper I’d submitted (I wonder whether it, too, is in that box in my garage?), he said to me, “Mr. Dean, like Hume, you don’t clothe your thoughts in wool.” I felt terrible; I had only a few minutes before told him of my and my wife’s decision that I was dropping out of the doctoral program, and we were returning to California.

The proximate cause, or occasion, of my looking up Professor Harris today was that I had just mentioned someone else at Northwestern to yet another person in my philosophical past, namely Professor John E. Smith (now emeritus at Yale University), with whom I got in touch this week after seeing his letter to the editor of today’s New York Times Book Review, “When Dusk Is Only Dusk.” Professor Smith was the chairman of the philosophy department at Yale when I was there, and I was a bursary student in his office. He wrote a letter of recommendation for my application for admission to Northwestern. 
    I “postscripted” him the paragraph from Wikipedia and asked whether he knew Harris. He answered that:

We were good friends for many years, he contributed to my Festschrift, The Recovery of Philosophy In America, and we took part together in numerous philosophical symposia, etc. He wrote an excellent book on Hegel’s Logic. I lost touch with him after I retired and did not know where he was. I did not know that he had passed away; the 101 does not surprise me.

How extraordinary! And what a kind and distinguished man Professor Smith is too. I am delighted, honored to be in touch with him.

Copyright © 2009, 2022 by Moristotle