Hartshorne, Charles.  Creative Synthesis and Philosophical Method.  Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983 [1970].

Abstract

"In this book, more than in others, I have attempted to find common ground with linguistic analysts, and to meet the demand of our time to use no technical philosophical or theological terms without taking care to explain them in words with standard non-philosophical uses. I have tried hard to say things sufficiently definite so that they could at least be right or wrong, and then if possible to eliminate what is wrong...In conclusions, though scarcely in method, I have some sympathy with Berdyaev and Teilhard de Chardin, since they show how a positive philosophy of religion can dispense with certain traditional dogmas of Western metaphysics, including the priority of being over becoming, the reduction of creaturely freedom to the mere reiteration of items in the divine fiat to create the world, the denial of chance or randomness in the world, the complete immutability of deity. In such matters I have been encouraged, but probably not otherwise influenced, by these men. Undoubtedly the closest parallel to, and probably the strongest influence upon, my philosophy is Whitehead's. However, the doctrine of "eternal objects" has always seemed to me, for reasons explained in Chapter IV, an extravagant kind of Platonism, a needless complication in the philosophy of process. Then, too, I question if God can be a single "actual entity," another doctrine which appears out of place in this philosophy. I am puzzled also by talk of "earlier" and "later" phases in the becoming of entities said to be devoid of actual succession. Finally, I explain - some would say, explain away - Whitehead's concept (or metaphor) of "perishing" very differently than some leading expositors do. With these considerable reservations I am not far from Whitehead, particularly in his views of memory, perception, and causality, summed up in the doctrine of "creative synthesis" or "creativity" as the "ultimate" abstract principle of existence...Ideally at least, a philosopher should be a mathematician and logician as well as metaphysician. Perhaps this could be said of Plato, certainly of Leibniz, Peirce, and Whitehead - scarcely of Descartes or of Kant, certainly not of Hegel, and not, in an emphatic sense, of Husserl or Wittgenstein. A philosopher, however, should also have a sense for the non-logical side of awareness. Ideally, he should have more in common with poets than even Aristotle, Leibniz, Husserl, or Russell have had. Here James and Bergson were great and so was Whitehead - who, however,  learned from the other two. It was so long ago that I can barely recall how it was, but I may have learned more metaphysically from Emerson's Essays (illogical as they are) and Wordsworth's and Shelley's metaphysical poetry (from which Whitehead also profited) than by reading and hearing Whitehead...Since technical logic alone cannot establish a metaphysics, intuitions being also needed, and since these, at least as put into words and conceptualized, are not infallible or invariable from person to person, how far philosophers can ever degree is deeply problematical. .It may strike some readers that (in Strawson's terms) I am doing "revisionist" rather than "descriptive" metaphysics. However, they will be right to this extent only: ordinary ways of speaking, for very good reasons, greatly simplify the complexities of life and the universe, with the result that philosophers who are too passive and unsuspecting in the face of these simplifications will not be describing human thought in its full range." - from the Preface