Hartshorne was a doctoral student at Harvard, and held posts at the University of Chicago, at Emory University, and the University of Texas at Austin. Hartshorne was best-known for his rehabilitation of the ontological argument for the existence of God, but he wrote widely on systematic metaphysics, defending a kind of panpsychism. Books included The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation (1934), Beyond Humanism (1937), Reality as Social Process (1953), Whitehead’s Philosophy (1972) and a volume on bird song, Born to Sing (1973).