By Donald Wayne Viney

Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) was the leading representative of what has come to be called process philosophy during the second half of the twentieth century; but his career spanned the better part of the century, and his influence extended beyond philosophy to include theology, psychology, and ornithology.…

By Donald Wayne Viney

A Staggering Productivity

Hartshorne continued his remarkable productivity into his nineties. Whitehead’s Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1935-1970 (1972), a collection of previously published pieces, was followed by two shorter works that treat Whitehead in historical context: Aquinas to Whitehead: Seven Centuries of Metaphysics of Religion (1976), a succinct historical overview and defense of dipolar theism, and Whitehead’s View of Reality (1981), which he co-authored with Creighton Peden (Hartshorne contributed the first three chapters).…

The only form of immortality for creatures that Hartshorne admits is what Whitehead called “objective immortality.” God’s memory is the measure of the reality of the past. Hence, everything a creature has been, all of its joys and sorrows, achievements and failures, are preserved in the mind of God as objectively immortal.…

By Donald Wayne Viney

God is required by Hartshorne’s metaphysics of indeterminism and psychicalism. Ordered or law-like relations in nature must be explained, if at all, by the creativity of one or many of the actualities comprising the universe. The order in question, however, is cosmic in scope.…

Hartshorne’s metaphysical position is indeterministic, psychicalist, and theistic. The most pervasive fact of experience, according to Hartshorne, is creativity, the becoming of novel actualities. Whitehead said in Process and Reality that the “many become one and are increased by one.” Hartshorne expresses the same idea by saying that “to be is to create.”…

By Donald Wayne Viney

A Creative Metaphysical Synthesis

The most complete statement of Hartshorne’s neoclassical metaphysics is found in Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (1970). He rejects the understanding of metaphysics as a search for a reality behind the veil of experience, and he has little patience with dogmatism, special claims to insight, or the search for indubitable truths.…