Rom Harré
New Zealand-British philosopher and psychologist (1927–2019)
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Biography
Harré was born in Āpiti, in northern Manawatu, near Palmerston North, New Zealand, but held British citizenship. He studied chemical engineering and later graduated with a BSc in mathematics (1948) and a Master's in Philosophy (1952), both at the University of New Zealand, now the University of Auckland.
He taught mathematics at King's College, Auckland (1948–1953) and the University of Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan (1953–54). He then studied at University College, Oxford, where he completed a B.Phil. under the supervision of J. L. Austin in 1956. After a fellowship at the University of Birmingham he was lecturer at the University of Leicester from 1957 to 1959.
He returned to Oxford as the successor to Friedrich Waismann as University Lecturer in Philosophy of Science in 1960. At Oxford, where he was a Fellow of Linacre College, he was active in the founding of the Honours School of Physics and Philosophy. He also played an important part in the discursive turn in social psychology, a field he came to in the middle of his career. After his retirement from Oxford in 1995, he joined the psychology department of Georgetown University (having previously taught at that university during Spring Semesters). There he continued as Distinguished Research Professor until he retired in 2016.
Harré gave yearly short courses as an adjunct professor at Binghamton University from 1975 through 1998 and occasional courses at both American University in Washington, D.C., and at George Mason University at Fairfax, Virginia. From 2009 until 2011 he served as Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics in conjunction with his US post. He was visiting professor at many places, teaching courses at Aoyama University, Tokyo; Universidad Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Lima, Peru; Free University at Brussels; Aarhus University in Denmark and elsewhere.
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Philosophical work
Harré was one of the world's most prolific philosophers of social science. He wrote on a wide variety of subjects including: philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, ontology, psychology, social psychology, chemistry, sociology and philosophy. He was an important early influence on the philosophical movement critical realism, publishing The Principles of Scientific Thinking in 1970 and Causal Powers with E. H. Madden in 1975. He supervised Roy Bhaskar's doctoral studies, and continued to maintain close involvement with realism. He also supervised Patrick Baert, German Berrios, and Jonathan Smith's doctoral studies, respectively in social theory, history and epistemology of psychiatry, and social psychology. Another one of Harré's distinctive contributions was to the understanding of the social self in microsociology, which he called "ethogenics:" this method attempts to understand the systems of belief or means by which individuals can attach significance to their actions and form their identities, in addition to the structure of rules and cultural resources that underlie these actions. He developed these ideas in The Explanation of Social Behaviour which he authored with Paul F. Secord in 1972. Subsequently in his 2002 book Cognitive Science, Harré's addresses biologically reductionist and false dualism tendencies, proposing a Wittgensteinian framework of dynamically interacting “persons,” “organisms,” and “molecules” grammars in which person-level descriptions of action, normativity, and experience retain conceptual priority over biological accounts. In his later years Harre returned to his first love of chemistry and became the honorary president of the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry. In addition to regular lectures and articles on the subject, he organized two international conferences on the philosophy of chemistry, one in Oxford and the second at the London School of Economics while he was the director of its Center for the Philosophy of Science.
Personal life
Harré was the uncle of New Zealand politician and trade unionist Laila Harré and professor of psychology and environmentalist Niki Harré.