His interests included cultural criticism, the history of ideas, aesthetics, film, filmmaking, and mysticism.

Students and colleagues regarded him as a strikingly independent, richly provocative educator and thinker.

In 1962 Earle, along with John Daniel Wild, James M. Edie, and others, founded the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.

[1] Earle's thought is infused with an appreciation of the singularity of human existences and with a sensibility that is both aesthetic and ethical.

He wrote that he considered his books Objectivity (1955), The Autobiographical Consciousness (1972), and Mystical Reason (1980) as a continuous set of works in which one idea is examined from three successive points of view.