The Owl of Minerva

published on July 12, 2019

A Turning Point in Oxford Idealism
Errol E. Harris’s Oxford Writings

As a young Victoria Scholar from South Africa studying at Oxford from 1931–33, Errol Harris encountered most of the prominent representatives of “Oxford Idealism” there. He discovered that, predominantly under the influence of Bradley, they were uniformly convinced that Hegel’s Naturphilosophie was a superfluous “addition” to his system, accomplishing nothing not already provided by the Science of Logic, and that, moreover, to treat Nature as a reality (as opposed to an appearance) would introduce a fundamental contradiction into Hegel’s thought. In this general attitude they were strongly supported by the Italian “neo-Idealists” with whom they were closely engaged. In work accomplished during those two years, Harris laid the foundations for a thorough reversal of this attitude, arguing that in the absence of a philosophy of nature Hegel’s system could be neither coherent nor complete. On this basis Harris would eventually succeed in constructing the outlines of a complete cosmology grounded in twentieth-century physical theory.