Category: Selected Essays by by Charles Hartshorne

Charles Hartshorne Philosophy is reasoning about fundamental beliefs or first principles. Philosophers deal with beliefs, not primarily as advocates or opponents of particular beliefs, rather as elucidators of them. Above all, philosophers explore conceptual possibilities for believing. What creeds people actually have is their affair, but philosophers can show them (a) what reasonably could be… Continue reading Analysis and Cultural Lag in Philosophy

By Charles Hartshorne Whitehead has profound points of agreement with Buddhism. It is almost harder to state the important differences than the aspects of agreement. This is the more remarkable in that evidences of actual influence of Buddhist works upon him are slight. For the Western thinker, as for the great Asiatic tradition, concrete entities… Continue reading Whitehead’s Differences from Buddhism

By Charles Hartshorne Editorial comments: The original of this piece is a single-spaced typed manuscript of four and a half pages which is on file at the Center for Process Studies at the Claremont School of Theology in Claremont, California. At the top of the first page is written in cursive, “Please return to Mrs.… Continue reading Life and the Everlasting

To the memory of my teachers in philosophy and psychology (then not sharply separated) at Harvard in 1919-23: James Naughton Woods (my advisor; whose counsel, “study logic, it’s the coming thing,” I should have taken more to heart than I did), scholar in Hindu philosophy, who in 1924 helped to turn a British mathematician, logician,… Continue reading Charles Hartshorne Tribute to His Teachers

By Charles Hartshorne1 Am I a theologian? The obvious and in a sense right answer is, no. But there is at least some ambiguity in the question. For there is an expression, “natural theology,” an expression whose validity, to be sure, has always been disputed, and in no age I suppose more widely challenged than… Continue reading Am I a Theologian?

My wife and I met Leo Szilard, one of the most delightful and obviously brilliant people we have known, late in 1942. He was working on the mysterious Metallurgical project at the Uni­versity of Chicago. (We met him through a Hungarian psychologist whose name we have forgotten.) He used to come to tea on our… Continue reading Recollections of Leo Szilard by Charles Hartshorne

For Minoru Otsuka1 Although much of Wisdom as Moderation was written more than ten — or even twenty or thirty years — ago, it states what I still believe. Living to my advanced age of 93, and being still able to think vigorously, have their advantages, one of which is that one has had ample… Continue reading Hartshorne’s Preface to Otsuka’s Translation of “Wisdom as Moderation”

By Charles Hartshorne Primitive animism and primitive materialism have the same origin, in an­cient unawareness of the reality and natures of cells, atoms, and still smaller constituents of visible things. These now known things are ever-active, in a general sense organic, and not demonstrably mindless — even though their col­lections sometimes appear unmoving. As Leibniz,… Continue reading Theism as Radical Positivism: Minds, Bodies, Yes; Mindless Matter, No; Causality, Yes; Determinism, No.

By Charles Hartshorne I awoke from a dream thinking how to arrive at my neoclassical theism in a few easy steps. We start from where we are, members of one of who knows how many species of animals on a comparatively tiny planet in a small solar system. Our species is special on this planet… Continue reading A Rapid Journey into Neoclassical Theism

By Charles Hartshorne I. Some Not Wholly Serious Preliminarieson Modesty and Its Opposite Before I begin this more or less chronological account of my intellectual coming to be, I wish to confess an apprehension that the reader will find the account self-serving and self-flattering. He might, however, remember that an illustrious board of elder statesmen… Continue reading Some Causes of My Intellectual Growth