A Phenomenological Revision of E. E. Harris’s Dialectical Holism

Springer Verlag (2021)
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Abstract

The purpose of this work is to critically assess Errol E. Harris’s process philosophy in the face of contemporary research in the special sciences. Harris devoted his life to grappling with the big questions concerning the relationships between nature, mind, and knowledge. His 70-plus year career was distinguished, his texts on the history of philosophy, philosophy of science, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and consciousness were widely published, and yet his metaphysics has until now remained excluded from mainstream discussions. This book’s contention is that Harris’s work reveals as yet unnoticed connections between theories in numerous scientific disciplines ranging from psychology to cosmology and that an examination of certain theories within these disciplines may serve to strengthen his original arguments. This work maintains that the resulting metaphysics frames a transdisciplinary paradigm shift and provides a viable solution to the hard problem of consciousness.

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Chapters

Harris’s Holism and Contemporary Analogues

In this chapter the principles of Harris’s holism are presented and compared with contemporary theses from a range of fields. Here, the aim is to demonstrate that Bohm’s implicate order and enactivism rely upon the same concepts of dialectical relations, holism, and process ontology as Harris’s syst... see more

The Need for a New Metaphysics

Errol E. Harris devoted his life to grappling with the big questions concerning the relationships between nature, mind, and knowledge. His 70-plus year career was distinguished, his texts on the history of philosophy, philosophy of science, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and conscious... see more

Towards a Teleonomic Philosophy of Biology

The goal of this chapter is to present the dialectical holist stance on key topics in philosophy of biology as a theoretical bridge to Harris’s metaphysics of mind. In Sect. 6.2, I set out Harris’s necessary and sufficient conditions for life and in subsequent sections I compare these contentions wi... see more

Levels of Complexity Within the Cosmos

This chapter examines in greater detail Harris’s conception of cosmic evolution, which he claims follows from the postulate of the Concrete Universal and supports his teleological anthropic principle . Section 5.2 begins with a sketch of Harris’s conception of cosmogenesis as characterized by self-o... see more

The Anthropic Principles of Dialectical Holism

In this chapter, Harris’s appeal to four versions of the anthropic principle are examined in light of four recently developed multiverse theories that some cosmologists consider effective for avoiding the conclusions of stronger anthropic reasoning. In Sect. 4.2, the weak anthropic principle and thr... see more

Dialectical Holism in Space-Time and Particle Physics

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce and evaluate the arguments and conceptual corner stones that are essential in a dialectical holist philosophy of physics. In Sect. 3.1, Harris’s appeal to relativity as empirical support of dialectical relations and the unifying principle is assessed for i... see more

Harris’s Reformation of the “Hard Problem”

As Harris’s philosophy of mind is fairly extensive, I confine my focus to only the central thread of his argument concerning efforts to naturalize subjectivity and knowledge. Towards this end, in Sect. 7.2, I clarify Harris’s anticipation of the autopoietic enactivism approach to consciousness. In t... see more

Bridging Philosophies of Consciousness and Cosmology

The aim of this chapter is to elucidate how Harris’s metaphysics of evolution purports to bridge the gap between mind and cosmos, thereby providing a phenomenological ontology. In Sect. 8.2, I outline Harris’s appeal to dynamic systems theory in neuroscience and his anticipation of theories depictin... see more

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James Schofield
Bentley University

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