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Wiki MarkupIn a context in which he is discussing "the rules relating concepts to reality," Hartshorne says, "If a concept refers neither to a producible positive entity nor to an inherent aspect of the ultimate productive power, then it does not refer and is void of coherent meaning" ("John Hick on Logical and Ontological Necessity": 162). Later in the same essay he says, "Thought always implies existence even though in some cases uninstantiated predicates are a part (never all) of what thought is about. . . . \ [W\]hat one is thinking of when one speaks of realities whose unreality is genuinely conceivable \ [is\] . . . the creative process that, instead of producing the thing in question, might produce or have produced something else instead" (165).

In interpreting these passages and others like them, I have naturally assumed that the two phrases, "the ultimate productive power" and "the creative process" are simply two ways of referring to the same thing -- namely, what Hartshorne speaks of, in another writing published only a couple of years later, as "creative becoming" or "creativity," which he there characterizes, significantly, as "the indispensable minimum of what thought is about" or as "indispensable referent of all meaning" ("Foreword" to The Ontological Argument of Charles Hartshorne: xiv). But if the intended referent of the phrases is indeed "creativity," and not "God," or "God as including the world," then I have a serious problem with them.

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