Yet they remain definite constituents of a divine reality about which true statements can still be made. My happy childhood was a gift my parents and the world offered to God. Someday Hartshorne's thoughts will be understood to number among these gifts, too. Ideas for our time Twentieth-century American philosophy has been largely dominated by dueling schools of thought Positivism recognizes only those concepts that can be empirically verified. It gets high marks for banishing the polysyllabic mumbo jumbo that plagued 19th-century philosophy, but it also defines the spiritual out of existence.
Analytical theory treats ideas as word structures divorced from any larger reality.
A currently unfashionable third school of thought is metaphysics, which holds that higher truths exist independent of culture or context. Because it contemplates transcendence, metaphysics has been scoffed at by postwar academia. Charles Hartshorne is among the few philosophers to have carried the torch for this idea. Inc. All rights reserved.