And another forthcoming Hartshorne title - The Unity of Being, this time a re-constructed and edited version of his doctoral dissertation. Copying the description below.
The Unity of Being - Charles Hartshorne
Edited by Randall E. Auxier and Hyatt Carter
Charles Hartshorne was the most influential proponent of the
process conception of God. While often seen as a disciple of Alfred
North Whitehead and Charles Sanders Peirce, Hartshorne's ideas are in
many ways original and often depart significantly from those of
Whitehead and Peirce.
The Unity of Being is the only major work written by
Hartshorne before coming under the influence of Whitehead and Peirce and
has never been accessible to the public until now.
Born in rural Pennsylvania in 1897, Charles Hartshorne became a
world-class philosopher of religion whose ideas about the nature of God
are still being examined and debated today. He was an especially
prolific writer in his eighth and ninth decades and was even active as a
centenarian. Having published 22 books between 1922 and 1997, and in
the wake of his death in 2000, Hartshorne is now becoming understood as
one of the few philosophers whose work bridges theology and academic
philosophy.
Hartshorne’s distinctive contribution was to combine Whitehead’s
process metaphysics with theology, resulting in a conception of God not
as a static entity but as a dynamic process. Traditionally, God is seen
as an unchanging, perfect being. But Hartshorne showed that God can be
understood better as always becoming, changing, and growing in ways that
can be rationally understood.
Hartshorne’s distinctive work has also been credited with
recovering and improving St. Anselm’s traditional ‘ontological argument’
and for reviving a version of natural theology in which God’s nature
and existence cannot be understood apart from the world of nature.
Randall Auxier and Hyatt Carter have carefully edited and Hartshorne’s Harvard Ph.D. dissertation of the same title.
The Unity of Being will add an important piece to Hartshorne’s intellectual legacy.
The Unity of Being will provide historians with insight
into the origin of Hartshorne’s ideas and the trajectory of his career,
and help better illuminate Hartshorne’s relationships to Whitehead and
other important influences in his career, notably the American
philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.
