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.
During his years at Kansas and Northwestern Harris's major publications included The Foundation of Metaphysics in Science (1965) and Hypothesis and Perception: The Roots of Scientific Method (1970).
In retirement his philosophical activity continued uninterrupted, giving rise to numerous articles and volumes, including Formal, Transcendental and Dialectical Thinking: Logic and Reality (1987).
[4] The verification principle, upon which empiricism is grounded, is held by Harris to be intrinsically false because sense perception is devoid of immediate self-evidence, depending on an interpretative context that is a product of thinking's discursive activity.
[citation needed] Nor is empiricism able successfully to overcome the logical antinomies infecting the inductive method, by which it usually tries to explain and justify the genesis and validity of the universal form of scientific theories.
Harris maintains that the temporal variation of different metaphysical doctrines cannot be regarded as a procession of discontinuous, subjective opinions whose validity, at best, is confined to particular epochs.
On the contrary, he asserts the existence of "eternal problems in philosophy"[5] and conceives their historical development as a unique, logically necessary, teleological process through which they progressively achieve more coherent and adequate formulations.
[citation needed] According to Harris, in fact, Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, as well as the contemporary cosmological theories of the "expanding universe", involve a plausible conception of the physical universe as a "finite but unbounded Whole", so that it can be safely regarded as an objective, natural embodiment of the infinitum actu, or "true infinity", which Hegel had instead confined to the subjectivity of life and spirit.
[10] Harris advocates the possibility of knowledge of objective truth; his criticism of the naïve realism of positivistic epistemology never takes the form of subjectivism or skepticism.
[11] For him truth is the apex of a teleological process, whose more abstract and elementary forms are the theoretical perspectives worked out by the natural and human sciences, while its most concrete, fully blown aspect coincides with the self-reflective activity of metaphysical thought.
The elements of his metaphysics show the acknowledged influences of Spinoza's rationalistic monism, Hegel's absolute idealism, Collingwood's logic, and Joachim's coherence theory of truth.
[citation needed] In 2017, James Schofield submitted his PhD thesis to the University of Canterbury titled Dialectical Holism: The Lost Metaphysics of E. E.
[14] In this work, he argued that Harris not only anticipated but provided a metaphysical framework for unifying a range of current theories across the otherwise disparate special sciences of cosmology, systems biology, and consciousness studies.