1897, June 5: birth of Charles Hartshorne in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, to Francis Hartshorne, an Episcopal minister, and Marguerite Hartshorne. He had five siblings: an older sister and four younger brothers, two of whom were identical twins.
1909: The family moved to Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, 28 miles from Philadelphia.
1911-15: attended, from his fourteenth to eighteenth years, Yeates Boarding School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
While home for Christmas during his first year at Yeates, Hartshorne acquired a book that, as he said, “changed my life from then on.” It was a bird guide—Chester A. Reed’s Song and Insectivorous Birds East of the Rockies, and this was the beginning of his bird watching and ornithological studies and reflections.
Two other “life-changing” books that he read while at Yeates were Emerson’s Essays and Literature and Dogma by Matthew Arnold. Arnold’s book, he recalled, “was almost like an explosion in my mind.”
1915: became a student at Haverford College where both his father and grandfather had previously attended. Rufus Jones, the Quaker mystic who taught philosophy at Haverford, was an influence. As Hartshorne wrote, “I took his course on the history of Christian doctrine, and heard him give many talks in Quaker meetings and other gatherings involving the entire college.”
1916: spent his summer vacation between the first and second years at Haverford mostly at the Plattsburg volunteer military training school for civilians.
1917-1919: during WWI he left Haverford, volunteered for the Army Medical Corp and, after a short stay in England, served for two years as an orderly in France.
1919: spent the summer in California where, among other things, he attended lectures at the University of California at Berkeley and heard C. I. Lewis on Fichte and Schelling.
1919: entered Harvard University where he majored in philosophy and earned three degrees: A.B. 1921, M.A. 1922, Ph.D. 1923.
1923: completed his Harvard doctoral dissertation, The Unity of Being. He later wrote that he had the greatest rush of ideas in his life while writing the dissertation (the second greatest was during a summer seminar in Japan in 1966).
1923-25: with a Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship awarded by Harvard, he studied abroad, mostly in Germany, but with productive visits to England, France, Austria, Italy, and Holland. He met many philosophers, among them Husserl and Heidegger.
1925: joined the Harvard philosophy department and was given three assignments: instructing a course; assisting Alfred North Whitehead; and editing the papers of Charles S. Peirce. The papers, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, were published in six volumes (1931-36) under the title Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce.
Hartshorne later reflected, “By sheer luck—for I had not asked for these assignments— I was to be intensively exposed, virtually simultaneously, to the thought of perhaps the two greatest philosophical geniuses who ever worked primarily in this country.”
1928: moved from Harvard to the University of Chicago as professor of philosophy and married Dorothy Eleanore Cooper in December of that year.
There was a scientific club at the University called The X Club that allowed only one philosopher among its members and Hartshorne counted himself lucky in being taken in to the club soon after his arrival. As he wrote, “I was guaranteed a considerable education in various sciences. Each month a member read a paper designed to be intelligible to those not specializing in his branch of science.”
1934: published his first book, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation.
1937: published his second book, Beyond Humanism: Essays in the New Philosophy of Nature.
1941: published book 3, Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism.
1941-42: taught for nine months at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
1945: The Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Vergilius Ferm, was published. Charles Hartshorne has 34 entries in this reference book. Some of the entries, such as the one on “cause” that runs over 2,000 words, qualify as mini-essays. One of my favorites, “God, as personal,” stands out as a model of clarity.
1947: received a joint appointment at Chicago in the Philosophy Department and the Meadville/Lombard Theological School.
1948: book 4, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God.
1948-49: lectured in German at the University of Frankfurt am Main and in French at the Sorbonne in Paris.
1951-52: on a Fulbright Professorship he went to Australia where he taught at Melbourne and gave lectures in Sydney, Adelaide, and Tasmania. On the way to and from, he visited the Fiji Islands, New Zealand, and Hawaii.
1952-53: spent the summers studying ornithology at the University of Michigan Biological Station in two courses in ornithology taught by Sewall Pettingill, and presented a paper at Ornithological Union that was later published in its journal.
Title of paper: “The Monotony-Threshold in Singing Birds”
1953: book 5, Philosophers Speak of God (with William L. Reese).
1953: book 6, Reality as Social Process.
1955: left Chicago for Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
While at Emory, he made ornithological excursions to Jamaica, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, South America, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Taiwan—for research, observation, and to make recordings of birdsong.
1958: lectured in Japan at Kyoto University and Doshisha University.
1962: moved to the University of Texas at Austin where he taught until 1978.
1962: book 7, The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays in Neoclassical Metaphysics.
1964: publication of The Hartshorne Festschrift—Process and Divinity: Philosophical Essays Presented to Charles Hartshorne. (30 essays, 3 appendices, 633 pages)
1965: book 8, Anselm’s Discovery: A Re-examination of the Ontological Argument for God’s Existence.
1966: on another Fulbright commission he went, first, to India, where he gave lectures in several cities and spent two months in Banaras Hindu University as a visiting professor and, second, to Japan to teach a summer seminar.
1967: book 9, A Natural Theology for Our Time.
1970: book 10, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method.
1972: book 11, Whitehead’s Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1953-1970.
1973: book 12, Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song.
1974: visited Australia to attend a World Congress in Ornithology and a meeting of the Australasian Philosophical Society and gave talks at both events.
1975: The following note from Dorothy Hartshorne was reported in the Winter/1975 issue of Process Studies: “On November 7 Charles was knocked down by a car when crossing the campus to a Ph.D. exam. Score: 5 bones broken (one in right shoulder, one in left foot, three ribs—luckily none weight-bearing or major) and 20 lacerations and contusions. He is making a good recovery, but has had much pain.” (p. 304)
1976: book 13, Aquinas to Whitehead: Seven Centuries of Metaphysics of Religion.
1978: visited Belgium.
1981: book 14, Whitehead’s View of Reality (with Creighton Peden).
1983: book 15, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers: An Evaluation of Western Philosophy.
1984: visited Japan and Hawaii where he gave keynote addresses—one to a meeting in Hawaii of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, the other to a meeting in Nagoya of the Japan Society for Process Studies.
1984: book 16, Creativity in American Philosophy.
1984: book 17, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes.
1987: book 18, Wisdom as Moderation.
1988: visited England.
1990: book 19, his autobiography, The Darkness and the Light: A Philosopher Reflects Upon His Fortunate Career and Those Who Made It Possible.
1991: publication of Volume 20 of The Library of Living Philosophers, The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, putting him in the company of Albert Einstein, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Buber, and fellow Harvardians Whitehead, Santayana, and Quine.
1995: Hartshorne’s wife, Dorothy, died on 21 November.
1997: book 20, The Zero Fallacy and Other Essays in Neoclassical Philosophy, is published by Hartshorne in his 100th year!
1997: The Hartshorne Centennial Conference at the University of Texas in Austin.
1998: Essays by and about Hartshorne from the above conference were published in Volume 14.2 of The Personalist Forum.
2000: Charles Hartshorne died on 9 October.
2001: The scholarly journal Process Studies, Volume 30.2, was a Special Tribute Issue for Charles Hartshorne.
As editor Barry Whitney noted: We offer this “all-Hartshorne” issue as a Special Tribute Issue for Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000). Previously, we dedicated Process Studies 29.2 (2000) to Hartshorne, but we wish, in this issue, to complete our tribute by the publication of four previously unpublished Hartshorne articles, a transcription of his Notes from a Whitehead class at Harvard in 1925-26, and the revised and updated Hartshorne Primary Bibliography. Our debt to Charles Hartshorne is inestimable. We rejoice in his life and work.
2001: Volume 22.2 of the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy was dedicated to essays about Charles Hartshorne.
2011: book 21 by Hartshorne, Creative Experiencing: A Philosophy of Freedom, edited by Donald Wayne Viney and Jincheol O, was published posthumously in 2011.
Source of Timeline Dates
Charles Hartshorne, The Darkness and the Light (his autobiography).
Charles Hartshorne, “Some Causes of My Intellectual Growth,” the opening essay in The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn.
Charles Hartshorne, “How I Got That Way,” in Existence and Actuality, edited by John B. Cobb, Jr. and Franklin Gamwell.
John B. Cobb, Jr., “Charles Hartshorne: The Einstein of Religious Thought.”
Donald Wayne Viney, “Charles Hartshorne: A Biography,” from American Philosophers before 1950, Thomson Gale.
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