Charles Hartshorne; Philosopher Focused Inquiry on Nature of God

Charles Hartshorne, a passionate and original thinker whose exploration of the nature of God brought him eminence as one of the 20th century’s foremost philosophers, has died.

Hartshorne, who turned 103 in June, died Monday at his home in Austin, Texas.

He developed what was, in post-modern America, a most unpopular view: that God really exists.

“Without God,” he often said, “how can we know what is true? Human beings barely know themselves, after all these centuries of inquiry. There must be a larger reality with a higher understanding of truth than ours.”

His conception of divinity was dynamic, portraying God not as the all-knowing commander of the cosmos, but as a participant who is changed by it, much as humans are. This view became known as “process theology,” and Hartshorne was its most influential proponent.

“He made it respectable again for philosophers to talk about God,” said Daniel Bonevac, a philosophy professor and former colleague of Hartshorne at the University of Texas at Austin. “He really almost single-handedly resuscitated the philosophy of theology as a serious branch of inquiry.”

Hartshorne used mathematics to bolster the logic of his unfashionable argument, offering 16 proofs of God’s existence--more, he claimed, than any other philosopher had found.

“Just as an exercise in intellectuality, it was a tour de force,” said John Silber, now chancellor of Boston University, who was chairman of the University of Texas philosophy department when he hired Hartshorne there in 1962. “It attracted a great deal of attention.” Silber considers Hartshorne one of the 10 most important American philosophers of the last century.

Hartshorne was born in Kittanning, Pa., the son of an Episcopal minister. Although his father was a theologian, his mother may have inspired him more with a simple statement that he never forgot. “Charles,” she told him when he was a boy, “life is big.”

The notion must have impressed him, because as a youth he was given to serious reading and reflection. Much later in life, he told a student that he had read and analyzed all the major philosophers by the time he was 16.

He entered Pennsylvania’s Haverford College in 1915. Then World War I interrupted his education. But it did not greatly interfere with the contemplative life he seemed to have chosen. He was shipped to Normandy, France, to serve as a hospital orderly but hauled overseas with him a trunkful of philosophy books. “Every time I was not on duty,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette some years ago, “I would read one.”

He was, like many participants in the war, deeply upset by the human toll in deaths and injuries. When he returned to the United States, he enrolled at Harvard as a philosophy major. One of his professors was Alfred North Whitehead, who would become his intellectual mentor. Hartshorne’s views of God and the universe were a creative adaptation of Whitehead’s philosophy that God was neither prophetic nor unchanging. The philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce and Henri Bergson were also major influences.

After graduating from Harvard, Hartshorne studied in Europe under Martin Heidegger, a leading existentialist. He returned to Harvard in 1925 where he undertook, with Paul Weiss, a massive project collecting and editing the papers of Peirce, the founder of pragmatism.

The six-volume work is considered a milestone in the development of American philosophy and brought wide attention to Peirce, who is often called the greatest American philosopher.

The first book Hartshorne wrote on his own was “The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation,” published in 1934. He taught philosophy at the University of Chicago from 1928 to 1955, then spent seven years at Emory University in Atlanta. He joined the University of Texas in 1962, retiring in 1977 when he was 80.

He wrote 20 books and hundreds of scholarly articles. Some of his most important works were published when he was in his 80s.

Some of his habits brought comparisons to the stereotypical absent-minded professor. He took a nap every afternoon, which he once said was a factor in his long life. “It’s better,” he said, “to put your sleeping into more than just one big bunch at night.”

The man who has his own entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica never owned a car and would become hopelessly lost whenever he ventured to drive. The bicycle was his preferred mode of transportation.

Age, friends and colleagues said, may have slowed him, but it did not dull his mind. At 100, he could still debate with passion and clarity the issues he had spent a lifetime considering, Bonevac said.

Although philosophy concerned him, it did not consume him. Hartshorne was an inveterate writer of letters to the editor, offering opinions on everything from taxes and feminism (for) to corporal punishment and suburban sprawl (against).

He also loved music. His wife of 67 years, the former Dorothy Cooper, was a classically trained soprano who died in 1995. One of his favorite pastimes was to listen to her sing Mozart to him in their living room.

Eventually, he came to see song as a form of creativity not limited to people.

Believing that it was “part of human egotism to believe that only we have active minds,” he traveled the world to study and record bird songs.

He became a noted ornithologist with the publication in 1973 of “Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song,” in which he argued that some birds, like some people, sing for the pure joy of it.

He was so esteemed by ornithologists that one time when he flew into Australia to be honored at a philosophers’ meeting, a group of bird scholars who were holding their own conference met him at the airport and spirited him away. The philosophers caught up with him later.

He is survived by a daughter, Emily Schwartz of Austin, and two grandchildren.