Bernard Harrison is currently Emeritus E.E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy in the University of Utah and an Emeritus Professor in the University of Sussex. He is one of a number of analytic philosophers, more numerous now than formerly, whose interests include literature and its relationships with philosophy and the history of ideas. His literary work includes Fielding's Tom Jones: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (Chatto, 1975), Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (Yale University Press, 1991), What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored (Indiana University Press, 2015), and numerous papers. His more strictly philosophical writings include work on epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the philosophy of language. His most recent book on such topics, Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language (Cambridge University Press, 2004), co-authored with his Utah colleague Patricia Hanna, offers a systematic rethinking, with implications, among other things, for literary studies, of the philosophy of language, as it has developed since Russell and Frege, on the basis of a new reading of Wittgenstein. He is currently (2017) at work on a study of the nature of anti-Semitism, and the continuity between its traditional and contemporary forms, under the title Blaming the Jews: The Persistence of a Delusion. It develops and carries further some of the ideas proposed in his The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

Updated in March 2017.