Charles Hartshorne 1897 – 2000

Charles Hartshorne was an American philosopher and the principal interpreter and developer of Whitehead's process metaphysics. After early studies at Harvard with R. B. Perry and a long-time editorial collaboration with Charles Sanders Peirce's papers, he taught at Chicago, Emory, and Texas, where he remained active well into his nineties. The Divine Relativity and Man's Vision of God articulated an original philosophical theology in which God is the supreme related being, including all that is and dependent on its actual course, while The Logic of Perfection revived and extended the ontological argument. He also produced a careful study of birdsong as a philosopher of nature.

Charles Hartshorne was born at Kittanning, Pennsylvania, in June 1897, the son of an Episcopal priest. After Haverford and a year of war service as an army hospital orderly he took bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees at Harvard, completing the doctorate in 1923, then spent two years in Germany on a Sheldon travelling fellowship attending the lectures of Husserl and Heidegger. Back at Harvard he served as research assistant to Whitehead and co-edited, with Paul Weiss, the first six volumes of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce.

He taught at the University of Chicago from 1928 to 1955, Emory from 1955 to 1962, and the University of Texas at Austin from 1962 until well past his official retirement. His major books are Beyond Humanism (1937), Man's Vision of God (1941), The Divine Relativity (1948), Reality as Social Process (1953), Philosophers Speak of God (1953, with William Reese), The Logic of Perfection (1962), Anselm's Discovery (1965), Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (1970), Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984), and the ornithological monograph Born to Sing (1973).

Hartshorne developed alongside Whitehead a 'process' or neoclassical theism in which God is dipolar, having an abstract necessary essence and a concrete contingent experience that includes and is enriched by the world; he revived and refined the modal ontological argument and defended panentheism against both classical theism and atheism. He was also a serious comparative ornithologist and one of the leading authorities on bird song. He died in Austin in October 2000 at the age of one hundred and three.