Category: Chapters from Hartshorne’s Books

Charles Hartshorne The thesis of this book, negatively stated, is as follows: The currently accepted principles of scientific research and explanation, as well as the most characteristic ideas of contemporary philosophy, have not as yet been applied, with the thoroughness which the problem merits, to the question of the nature and distribution of the qualities… Continue reading Definition of the Affective Continuum

Charles Hartshorne Our rule is to seek to reduce given distinctions to the mode of continuity. Now the contents of awareness are distinguished as a whole from the awareness which embraces them. We infer from the rule that we are to regard the difference between content and awareness as a matter of degree only, involving… Continue reading The Affective Continuum

Charles Hartshorne If the particular sense qualities which we intuit characterize, in this particularity, not so much things in themselves as the biological uses which are made of objects, it may none the less be true that things in themselves must be conceived in terms of a general analogy with the qualities of our experience.… Continue reading The Verification Of Panpsychism

Charles Hartshorne Since theology is now passing through its profoundest revolution since the early centuries of the Christian Era, it is impossible that brief reference to it should be free from the danger, if not the certainty, of serious misunderstand­ing. Nevertheless, the bearings of the concept of affective continuity upon the theistic hypothesis are so… Continue reading The Affective Continuum in Theology

Charles Hartshorne In the hundred years since Darwin was a young man, science has made immense advances. Its most fundamental conceptions have been altered and clarified. During this same period theology also has made advances, though of these the public has been less well informed. It has been found that the conception of God upon… Continue reading Three Ideas of God

Charles Hartshorne So old and widely used a term as “God,” it is frequently said, should not be given a radically new meaning. Perhaps this is just; but it should be remembered that there are several ancient meanings for “God” rather than but one. Admitting that the God of some present-day philosophers is not the… Continue reading Religious Bearings of Whitehead’s Philosophy

Charles Hartshorne What has Whitehead contributed to the subjects of metaphysics and cosmology? By “metaphysics” I mean the study of the necessary, eternal, completely universal aspects of reality; by “cosmology,” the attempt, combining metaphysics and scientific knowledge, to discern the large, comparatively universal features of nature as now constituted. Cosmology is science running more risks… Continue reading Whitehead’s Metaphysics

Charles Hartshorne Except for a hasty reading of The Concept of Nature and a still hastier perusal of early, passages in Principia Mathematica, I was, as a graduate student at Harvard, unacquainted with Whitehead and his philosophy. However, in 1925, as a young instructor, I began to hear him lecture, to grade student papers for… Continue reading Whitehead after Forty-Five Years

Charles Hartshorne 　I: The Basic Categories What Whitehead called speculative philosophy, the central or noncontingent core of which he sometimes called metaphysics, is a difficult enterprise; and at most only a few crucially important individuals occur in it in a century. Plato and Leibniz were outstanding examples in the past, and in the hundred years… Continue reading Whitehead in Historical Context

Charles Hartshorne Twenty-five years ago a critic of my ontological argument reminded us that if the premises of the argument are tautological rather than factual, that is, if they are “true in all possible worlds, then. . . they are vacuously true, since they then tell us nothing particular about our world.”1 He failed to… Continue reading How Some Speak, Yet Do Not Speak, About God