Charles Hartshorne: Biography and Psychology of Sensation Charles Hartshorne is widely regarded as having been an important figure in twentieth century metaphysics and philosophy of religion. His contributions are wide-ranging. He championed the aspirations of metaphysics when it was unfashionable, and the metaphysic he championed helped change some of the fashions of philosophy. He counted … Continue reading Hartshorne: Biography and Psychology of Sensation →.

Charles Hartshorne: Theistic and Anti-Theistic Arguments Charles Hartshorne is well known in philosophical circles for his rehabilitation of Anselm’s ontological argument. Indeed, he may have written more on that subject than any other philosopher. He considered it to be the argument that, more than any other, reveals the logical status of theism. Nevertheless, he always … Continue reading Hartshorne Theistic and Anti-Theistic Arguments →.

Charles Hartshorne: Dipolar Theism From the beginning to the end of his career Charles Hartshorne maintained that the idea that “God is love” was his guiding intuition in philosophy. This “intuition” presupposes both that there is a divine reality and that that reality answers to some positive description of being a loving God. This article … Continue reading Hartshorne, Charles : Dipolar Theism →.

Charles Hartshorne: Neoclassical Metaphysics Charles Hartshorne was an intrepid defender of the claims of metaphysics in a century characterized by its anti-metaphysical genius. While many influential voices were explaining what speculative philosophy could not accomplish or even proclaiming an end to it, Hartshorne was trying to show what speculative philosophy could accomplish. Metaphysics, he … Continue reading Hartshorne, Charles: Neoclassical Metaphysics →.

The first issue of the International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion appeared in the Spring, 1970. This collection of essays is presented in cele bration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the journal. Contributors to the volume are to be counted among today's leading philosophers of religion. They represent different approaches to the philosophical consideration of religion and their published work is helping shape discussions of the philos ophy of religion as we approach the beginning of the twenty-first century. Considered (...) by some to be terminal at mid-century, the philosophy of reli gion has undergone a renaissance during the second half of the century. And the journal may be said to provide some of the explanation for this develop ment. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Edgar Henderson, Robert Leet Patterson and Henry Sprinkle, founders of the journal. Without their vision and determination it would not have come into existence. (shrink)

This article describes some historical precursors that led to William James’s participation in the Hibbert Lectures and his subsequent publication of A Pluralistic Universe. William James viewed the monism–pluralism issue as the greatest issue the human mind can frame, and he returned to this issue again and again in his psychological and philosophical works. The Hibbert Lectures afforded an opportunity to explore the problem of monism and pluralism in a broadly religious or spiritual context. We describe James’s logical and experiential (...) attacks on monistic thinkers, his seemingly paradoxical introduction of Gustav Fechner’s panpsychism to English-speaking philosophers, and his spirited defense of pluralism. We conclude by discussing the relevance of James’s pluralism for current questions of unification in psychology. (shrink)

This article concerns primarily the concepts of God in process theism, especially as they appear in the later writings of A. N. Whitehead and in the works of Charles Hartshorne. The article concludes with a brief discussion of arguments for God's existence in process thought and a note on the historical influences on, and anticipations of, process theism.

The first part of this book is a translation of a philosophical work by the Breton philosopher Jules Lequyer, which explores questions of divine justice and human equality. The second part is a biography of Lequyer by Donald Wayne Viney, based on Prosper Hemon's life of Lequyer, and other material.

In a lucid and comprehensive study, Professor Viney presents an excellent critical analysis of Hartshorne's thought about God.

Anselm said that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, but he believed that it followed that God is greater than can be conceived. The second formula—essential to sound theology—points to the mystery of God. The usual way of preserving divine mystery is the via negativa, as one finds in Aquinas. I formalize Hartshorne’s central argument against negative theology in the simplest modal system T. I end with a defense of Hartshorne’s way of preserving the mystery of (...) God, which he locates in the actuality of God rather than in the divine existence or essence. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God. (shrink)

Until recently the most prominent defender of the openness of God was Charles Hartshorne. Evangelical thinkers are now defending similar ideas while being careful to distance themselves from the less orthodox dimensions of process theology. An overlooked figure in the debate is Jules Lequyer. Although process thinkers have praised Lequyer as anticipating their views, he may be closer in spirit to the evangelicals because of the foundational nature of his Catholicism. Lequyer’s passionate defense of freedom conceived as a creative act (...) as well as the theological implications he drew from this are examined for their relevance to the present discussion of the openness of God. (shrink)

Where religion is concerned, the best and most lasting contribution of America's founders was arguably more political than theological. They brought to fruition the idea of religious freedom. To be sure, this concept had already been articulated and underwent important developments prior to the eighteenth century.2 The Americans, however, began to make it a reality in the sphere of public life. This is nowhere more evident than in the Constitution of the United States and in the first article of the (...) Bill of Rights. Nevertheless, some of the founders had a great deal to say on theological topics, and it is this aspect of their thinking on which I focus in this paper. Some of the founders were orthodox Christians .. (shrink)

Philip Clayton, Ingraham Professor of Theology at Claremont School of Theology, is widely recognized both as a major contributor to contemporary discussions of the relations between science and religion and as a philosopher-theologian of great originality. Although Clayton invariably couches his arguments and conclusions in fallibilist terms, this is, by any measure, an ambitious book. It is the closest thing yet to his magnum opus. Included are revisions of fifteen previously published articles that appeared between 1997 and 2008 and revisions (...) of two lectures delivered at Claremont in 2004.Following the editor's introduction, the book is divided into five parts. Part 1 could be read as a commentary on Whitehead's .. (shrink)

A previously unpublished manuscript found among Hartshorne's papers, the book was completed by Hartshorne in the mid-1980s and constitutes a vigorous and wide-ranging defense of his “neoclassical metaphysics” of creative freedom. Eight of the chapters are revisions of articles Hartshorne published between 1953 and 1986; the remaining five chapters and the preface were not published prior to the appearance of this book.

The nineteenth-century metaphor of a block universe in which science is regarded as a structure consisting of basic building blocks resting on firm foundations is contrasted with the contemporary metaphor of science as a network of relations. The network metaphor challenges the view that one science is more foundational than others and raises questions about whether an all-pervasive unity is desirable or even possible. The unity-disunity issue in psychology and other sciences is discussed with respect to the network and building (...) block metaphors and with respect to three arenas: organizations, methodology, and subject content areas. It is argued that in these three arenas, psychology is no more disunified than biology. There is no basis for the development of a disciplinary inferiority complex based on the belief that the other sciences are unified while psychology remains in the intellectual backwaters of plurality. (shrink)

Positions in the ongoing debate about free will are characterized and compared, that is, determinism, indeterminism, chaoticism, stronger and weaker versions of indeterminism and chaoticism, and hard and soft determinism, and libertarianism. Libertarianism is claimed to be the most adequate of these alternatives and is defended from the process perspectives of A. N. Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and the psychologist-philosopher William James. The defence is developed by responding to three objections to libertarianism: (1) that scientific explanations in psychology and other disciplines (...) require belief in causal determinism; (2) that indeterminism, assumed by libertarianism, makes impossible moral or other kinds of responsibility for human acts; and (3) that libertarianism must assume an untenable mind-body dualism. The article concludes that liber4tarianism is a more subtle and cogent position than most of its opponents have recognized, that determinism has glaring deficiencies of its own, and that libertarianism is an appropriate position for psychology—even for a scientific psychology. (shrink)

Griffin’s book contributes to the literature of cumulative arguments for God’s existence, revealing the deficiencies of the “God Almighty” of traditional theism (i.e., Gawd) and the strengths of a Whiteheadian process theism (i.e., God). Since the concept of omnipotence is central, it is imperative to note that there are three ideas of divine power in traditional theism, not always carefully parsed by Griffin. Evolutionary theory requires rethinking theism, but, contrary to Griffin, many of the problems posed by the theory are (...) less for belief in Gawd than for fundamentalism. Nevertheless, an interactive dipolar deity fits most naturally with evolutionary thinking to provide a concept of God All-Loving. Griffin is at his best discussing the ground of abstract truths. He does not, however, avail himself of some of the best arguments against traditional theism found in Hartshorne’s work; there is also the question whether Griffin would accept Hartshorne’s idea of the modal coincidence of God’s existence and all possibility and how this would affect his cumulative case. (shrink)

Nematodes are important parasites of humans and other animals. Nematode parasitism is thought to have evolved by free‐living, facultatively developing, arrested larvae becoming associated with animals, ultimately becoming parasites. The formation of free‐living arrested larvae of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is controlled by the environment, and involves dafachronic acid (DA) and transforming growth factor (TGF)‐β signalling. Recent data have shown that DA acid signalling plays a conserved role in controlling larval development in both free‐living and parasitic species. In contrast, TGF‐β (...) signalling does not seem to be conserved; this difference perhaps points to how nematode parasitism did evolve. (shrink)

In The Untamed God (2003), Jay Wesley Richards defends what he calls “theological essentialism,” which affirms God’s essential perfections but also recognizes contingent properties in God. This idea places Richards’s view in the vicinity of Charles Hartshorne’s dipolar theism. However, Richards argues that Hartshorne’s modal theory suffers from the defects that it abandons the principle ab esse ad posse, makes nonsense of our counter-factual discourse, and can only be expressed by C. I. Lewis’s S4, although for certain purposes Hartshorne needs (...) the stronger S5. Richards, however, fails to realize that Hartshorne’s theory involves two concepts of necessity—necessity as what is common to every possible world-state and necessity as it pertains to the unalterability of the past. While questions remain about Hartshorne’s theory, Richards’s arguments against it are unsuccessful. Most importantly, Richards uncritically accepts the concept of possible worlds as a basis for his critique, but Hartshorne’s arguments cast doubt on the coherence of this idea. Possible worlds provide anything but a firm foundation on which to make sense of either theological essentialism or Hartshorne’s panentheistic dipolar theism. (shrink)

This paper presents, explains, and addresses the pedagogical utility of the “Wachter crystal,” a three-dimensional representation of basic principles of logic designed and created by Thomas Wachter in 1992. The author first discusses a way of understanding relations of logical inference which groups propositions possessing identical truth tables into the same class (that is, a way of conceptualizing rules for replacement). Next, the author presents and explains a 16 x 16 matrix, the most basic figure for representing the inferential relations (...) between the classes of propositional logic. Such a matrix easily maps reflexivity, asymmetry, and transitivity in relations of implication. Moreover, since the relations and properties it illustrates can also be illustrated by a lattice, one can construct a three-dimensional model to represent them. The Wachter crystal, which resembles chemists’ models of molecules, illustrates the same principles as the matrix while foregrounding the commonly-neglected difference between Philonian conditionals (which belong to the object language of propositional logic) and implication (which belong to the metalanguage). In addition to being a perspicuous and aesthetically engaging way to represent basic principles of propositional logic, the Wachter crystal is a bridge to more advanced logical concepts such as modal logic, sentence connectives, and predicates of sentences. (shrink)

Jules Lequyer (Lequier) (1814—1862) Like Kierkegaard, Jules Lequyer (Luh-key-eh) resisted, with every philosophical and literary tool at his disposal, the monistic philosophies that attempt to weave human choice into the seamless cloth of the absolute. Although haunted by the suspicion that freedom is an illusion fostered by an ignorance of the causes working within us, he […].

In this essay I argue that Malone-France’s anti-realistic interpretation of the Hartshorne-Peirce theory of possibles can be challenged in a number of ways. While his interpretation does suggest that there are in fact two distinct accounts of possibility in Hartshorne’s philosophy, one that is vulnerable to an antirealistic interpretation and one that is not, Hartshorne does have a consistent and defensible doctrine of possibles. I argue that Whitehead’s contrasting “nonprotean” theory of possibles or “eternal objects” has its own set of (...) conundrums to face, including problems with the coherence of the notion of the completeness of eternal objects and problems with infinite regresses. Whether Whitehead’s or Hartshorne’s account of possibles is correct, I concur with Malone-France that the Molinist doctrine of divine knowledge of future contingents is flawed. (shrink)

Behind the playful title of this book there is a serious theory about the origin of religions, as well as an argument concerning their usefulness and the truth claims they make. Anyone familiar with Shults's work will recognize this book as a companion to his Theology after the Birth of God—and, to a lesser extent, Iconoclastic Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism—repeating the basic argument but adding an avalanche of more recent research, engaging some different interlocutors, and outlining (...) the virtues of computer modeling as an avenue of inquiry.1 The first and last chapters detail the core of Shults's theory and the evidence for it; the inner ten... (shrink)

This article examines the thought of the nineteenth-century French thinker Jules Lequyer, who influenced Charles Renouvier, William James, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Charles Hartshorne, who never ceased to promote Lequyer's importance, refers to the Frenchman in all but five of his twenty-one books. Lequyer is especially noteworthy because of his philosophical defense of human freedom against any sort of determinism.

The influence of Jules Lequyer [or Lequier] in philosophy, especially American philosophy, is disproportionate to the widespread ignorance of his name and to the fragmentary state of his literary remains. On the subject of free will, Lequyer’s influence on William James was profound, although James did not acknowledge his debt to the Frenchman, nor has it been recognized by most James scholars. It is true that James considered Lequyer “a French philosopher of genius,”1 but inexplicably, he never mentioned Lequyer by (...) name in his published work. Lack of knowledge of Lequyer among Anglophones is perhaps not surprising since, in addition to James’s curious silence, it took more than a hundred.. (shrink)