1 Professor Harris has made a number of objections to my review of his two books. Formal, Transcendental and Dialectical Thinking and The Reality of Time. I should first say in response to Harris, parting shot that I do not number myself amongst the ranks of dogmatic “anti-Hegelians” (“Eloquence, Cogency or Sleight of Hand” p 102). My position would best be described as moderately sceptical, but agnostic. The difficulty with assessing arguments in support of Hegel's metaphysic is putting them in terms which do not presuppose the validity of the Hegelian standpoint. That is why I found myself attempting to reconstruct Harris' arguments, and his overall strategy, in a form which would have some chance of appealing to the non-dogmatic “anti-Hegelian”. I have failed to discover anything in either of Harris' two works that would suffice to dissuade the sceptic. That is not to say that the arguments Harris brings forward have no force at all, or do not at least call for a reappraisal of alternative views.

2 The question of probability and cogency (Eloquence p 98) is no trifling matter To the extent that there can be such a thing as philosophic judgement – the assessing of the weight of general considerations and mediation between conflicting views which cannot be reduced to cut-and-dried proof – there is room for talk of probabilities. Within a shared outlook, philosophers can bring arguments to bear which increase or decrease the probability of a given theory. Where there is a fundamental clash of outlooks, that is certainly more difficult (I will not say impossible). However, I do find it hard to see how one might say such a thing as, “On balance, my judgement is that Hegel was right”. Something stronger is called for. And that “something” Harris fails to provide.

3 I do not see any real disagreement between Harris and myself regarding judgement in relation to systematic wholes (Eloquence pp 99-100). It is because logical atomism is false – something we both believe – that a form of judgement arises whose rationality cannot be reduced to formal rules. I am sorry for giving the impression that I was making a point against Harris when I repeated his observation that most formal logicians would refuse to admit that their logic implied a metaphysic. However, Harris seriously misrepresents me when he reports me as saying that, according to him, “nothing can be said about what makes dialectical inference valid”. My actual words included the indefinite article, “a dialectical inference” (Review p 101). Of course there is something to say in general about the rationality of dialectical inferences. But it is not something that can be used as a test for the validity of a particular dialectical inference, the way that an account of formal validity provides a means of assessing particular formal inferences in terms of the correct or incorrect application of axioms and rules of inference.

4 With regard to Sherlock Holmes' “method of elimination” (Eloquence p 99, Review p 102), I would still maintain that Harris argues for a metaphysic by amassing arguments against alternative views. (I myself believe that there is an alternative that Harris does not consider at all; what I say against the method of elimination does not depend on that belief.) I concede that Harris does not represent the strategy of his argument in such terms. But it is the only way I could see of giving his investigation of different “logics” any persuasive force. (Merely calling the moves from formal logic to transcendental logic, and from transcendental logic to dialectical logic “dialectical” does not make the argument any more convincing.)

5 The reason causation is “crucial” for David Bohm, contrary to what Harris says (Eloquence p 99), is just that he is committed to a more general notion of “law” than one modelled on our pretheoretical intuitions about the relation of “cause and effect” (cf the reference in my review to Wholeness and the Implicate Order pp 111-5; on p 114 Bohm makes clear his view of how “rational law … goes far beyond causality”, the latter deriving by generalization from human “causal actions”). It seems to me, however, suppositious to represent Bohm's alternative notion of “rational law” or “order” as the “governance by the whole of the nature and behaviour of its parts” (Eloquence p 99). The only way one can read “governance” is in terms of the application or imposition of a directive principle. The mere fact of interconnectedness, even in the intimate form envisaged by Bohm, requires no such principle. I therefore think I was right to exclude teleology from the “holistic” view as such, as represented in Bohm's account. That does not mean that for me, teleological explanation necessarily represents events as “aim[ing] at goals, as do human intentions” (Harris p 4). It is one thing to say that the workings of a system can only be understood or judged holistically; it is something quite different, I believe, to assert the existence, within that system, of a “nisus towards wholeness andintegraton” (RT p 65, quoted in my review p 103). It is this second, “teleological” aspect to holism as Harris understands that notion that I have not been persuaded to accept.

6 I did not identify Harris as a “creationist” (Eloquence p 100). I only said that he uses the same arguments as creationists use. If one does not regard evolution by natural selection on the basis of random genetic mutation as sufficient to account for the observed facts without supplementation by some non-mechanistic principle, then I would claim, against Harris, that it is “perverse” to call oneself any kind of “Darwinian”. The whole point of the theory is to explain design in the natural world as the result of the workings of chance; once that aim is given up, the theory loses its interest. The question is, How does one argue for or against the theory, case by case? What Dawkins' admittedly simple examples show is how arguments to the effect that such-and-such an attribute “could not have evolved purely as the result of chance mutations” gain superficial plausibility through our lack of imagination or failure to go sufficiently into details. Harris, in response to Dawkins' example of the patch of light-sensitive cells evolving a narrow rim of skin, argues that other mutations would have to occur at the same time in order that the shadow cast be interpreted correctly by the nervous system. Why? If pressed on this point Dawkins would surely argue that we may imagine that the creature first evolves the capacity to judge the direction of light through shadows cast by other objects on the flat patch of light-sensitive cells, and only then evolves the rim of skin. (This illustrates a general point about the orthodox evolutionist's strategy for dealing with such cases.) No doubt there are more details that could be gone into, requiring no little ingenuity on the part of the mechanistic interpretation in reducing apparently enormous improbabilities to manageable proportions. As an aid to seeing whether a proposed explanation will work, computer models, if not indispensable, are certainly very useful.

7 Harris' point about Hegel's Naturphilosophie is well taken (Eloquence p 101). It is an interesting and valuable exercise to investigate all the evidence from recent developments in science that would have been taken by Hegel as further “proof of his system. That would on its own be sufficient to justify a book, or a number of books, detailing the evidence, case by case. That Harris does not confine himself to such an investigation is not in itself a ground for criticism. But it must be said that his presentation combines together very different kinds of philosophical argument; and it was these that I sought in good will to untangle and present separately so that the cogency of each argument could be assessed on its own merits. I believe I was therefore right to deal with what I called the “argument from science” separately from the purely a priori argument for Hegelianism based on the alleged deficiencies of naturalism and transcendental idealism.

8 On the nowness of “now” (Eloquence p 101), I can only repeat Harris' own words: “As the present is indistinguishable from any other moment in time, it would seem to have no intrinsic value of its own, and tears shed for the past as such are indeed idle tears” (RT p 34, quoted in my review p 104). Harris claims he “emphatically” did not assert that we “cannot account for there being such a time as now”. I can only suppose he means that we can explain the sense in which every time is “now” in relation to a possible knowing subject that exists at that time. But there is something else that still needs to be explained: how it is that there is one time which is actually now. It is one aspect of the problem of indexical reference. (Another aspect of the problem is how there can be such an individual as I.) Hegel disposes of these worries in the very first section of the Phenomenology in an impressive display of dialectical skill. Yet there are those who would remain unpersuaded. It is hardly surprising, therefore, and in the circumstances quite excusable, if this is one aspect of the reality of time that Harris fails to take seriously.

9 I have no interest in defending the “atemporalist” as Harris characterizes him from criticisms based on current physical theory (Eloquence pp 101-2). I have my own, independent reasons for thinking that the atemporalist must be wrong. All I said was that the atemporalist will always have recourse to the concept of “illusion”: if “Einstein, Eddington and Milne are right”, then we must understand the mathematics of relativity theory in a “temporal” way; this would not necessarily embarrass the atemporalist (say, a Bradley or a McTaggart) who saw a sharp distinction between physics and metaphysics.

10 Finally, my swift defence of “temporalism” from the Platonist's criticism is all that is needed to rebut what Harris actually says. In remarking that “Platonists would say that” (that the temporalist inevitably falls into chaos and scepticism) I was pointing to a line of defence which rejects the Platonist criticism as founded on a specious dichotomy. In the absence of any justification for the dichotomy, one might justifiably accuse the Platonist, in calling attention only to forms of anti-Platonism favourable to his case, of stooping to ignoratio elenchi.