This photograph was taken ten years ago, when my wife Dorothy and I were still in our eighties. We have not changed all that much. In 2026 we shall have been married for 70 years. Dorothy’s field is English literature. She has done many things, including lecturing in schools and colleges, working with disturbed children and Mexican immigrants in Salt Lake City, bringing up three children of our own, more recently giving talks and courses on writers as varied as Kipling, Jane Austen, George Eliot and John Buchan for that very British institution the University of the Third Age, and even producing, at one point, a highly readable page-turner of a detective thriller [Dorothy Harrison, A Death Observed, currently available on Amazon].
Among other things, our marriage has been a very long conversation about books and ideas, which has influenced the work of mine that you will find on this website.
My work tends to be suspicious of “theory” in all its many forms, sceptical concerning the abstruse doubts raised by philosophical scepticism in all its forms, and sympathetic towards the unreconstructed beliefs and assumptions of the ordinary, unphilosophical mind. It agrees with Wittgenstein that “there must be perfect order in even the vaguest sentence” [Philosophical Investigations, I.98], and like him, believes the (often very difficult) task of good philosophy to be that of arriving at a clear view of how that order serves us and works out in practice.
Thus, for example, I have argued, in the spirit of J.L. Austin’s attack on scepticism regarding our knowledge of the physical world (Sense and Sensibilia, OUP 1960), that scepticism concerning our knowledge of the content of the conscious experience of other people (specifically, the content of others’ experience of colour) is similarly founded on ingenious sophistry.
In moral philosophy I have argued, following Julius Kovesi, against non-cognitivism and emotivism, and also against all versions of the two main types of cognitivism that descend to us from Kant and the Utilitarians, both of which take morality to involve a relationship between each concrete individual person and some abstract human totality, in favour of exploring the ways in which moral commitment derives from the need to secure the possibility of moral relationships of many kinds between one concrete individual person and another. My basic claim here is that morality is not something we must accept if we wish to satisfy our interests (or, for that matter, the interests of mankind in general), but something we must accept if we wish merely to have interests of certain, non-egoistic, kinds essential to the enjoyment of life.
In literary studies, I have argued (Inconvenient Fictions, Yale UP, 1991; What is Fiction For?, Indiana UP, 2015), the latter available in full here) against the view, characteristic of both Marxism and Critical Theory, that literature offers pleasing but essentially fantasized accounts of human reality sympathetic to the interests of this or that current power group, and in favour of the traditional presumption of humanistic criticism, that literature offers knowledge: insight into the human condition. However I do not believe, unlike some writers who share my suspicions of many of the dogmas of current “critical theory”, that literature offers factual knowledge (except accidentally, as it were, when the descriptive elements of a fiction happen to be historically or culturally accurate in ways interesting to an historian or anthropologist). The business of serious literature is not with truth but with meaning. What it offers us, I argue, is dangerous knowledge: knowledge which possesses the power to change us because it concerns the potential limitations and inadequacies of concepts and assumptions in terms of which we normally make sense of our lives.
My arguments in all these areas derive from a philosophy of language (Hanna and Harrison, Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language, Indiana University Press 2004, available in full here) hostile to the meaning-scepticism which has played a dominant role in analytic philosophy since the 1960s.
The arguments of Word and World in turn rest partly on the contrarian understanding of the connections between the concepts of truth, meaning and use in the later philosophy of Wittgenstein worked out in a handful of exegetical papers also available on this website.
In the paper on “Reality and Culture” I have made an attempt to provide a preliminary guide to the ways in which my writings on the above very diverse collection of topics are supposed to connect up into a single coherent project of enquiry.
In 2002, when something clearly recognisable to many observers, and certainly to someone of my age, as antisemitism of a very traditional type, began to make its appearance on the left of politics throughout the West, I also become interested in a range of questions concerning the conceptual structure of antisemitism and its functions in non-Jewish society and politics (The Resurgence of Antisemitism: Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion, Rowman and Littlefield, 2006; Blaming the Jews: Politics and Delusion, Indiana UP, 2020). Here again I have found myself in effect attacking scepticism of yet another type: in this case scepticism concerning the specificity to Jews of the Jewish experience of antisemitism. It is very common to imagine that the Jewish experience of antisemitism differs in no way, except by being often less extreme, from the experience of racial hostility suffered by many other groups in the West, including blacks and Muslims; in effect, that the nature of antisemitism can be adequately captured by some such definition as “antisemitism is hostility to Jews as Jews”, and that that is essentially the end of the matter.
This ignores the evident fact that antisemitism comes in two quite distinct forms. In one of these forms it certainly is simply a mental disposition, of a type familiar in many other contexts, consisting in hostility to any member of some disliked and despised group merely for being a member of that group. I have called this “social antisemitism”. In its second form (“political antisemitism”), however, it is not a mental disposition at all, but a system of deranged political beliefs to the effect that the Jews are an inherently evil people, that there exists a hideously successful “Jewish Conspiracy” that secretly rules the world and is responsible for all the wars and sufferings that non-Jews endure, and that the supposed hidden power exercised by “the Jews” is rendered so untouchable by the conspiratorial abilities which underpin it that the only way of remedying it is to get rid of the Jews completely. This second type of antisemitism is, I have argued, entirely specific to the Jews. Nothing remotely similar has ever been alleged of any comparable group, indigenous or diasporic. To ignore the existence of this type of antisemitism is, among many other things, to render it impossible either to understand the motivation of the Nazi Auflösung der Jüdischen Problem, or to grasp what was unique about the Holocaust. It also makes it perilously easy to ignore the essential antisemitism of much in one’s own everyday thinking. A selection of my work in this area will be found on this website.
Bernard Harrison