Notes to Hartshorne's Born to Sing - An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song

Preface

Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000), have been observing and reading about singing birds for more than fifty years (longer than philosophy). (p. xiii-xiv)

Most intensive fieldwork has been done first in eastern, southern, and far western United States (have listened to birds in about forty states, including Hawaii), then in Australia, and later in Japan, India, and Nepal; extensive observations in England and several other European countries, in Middle and South America, Jamaica, Uganda and Kenya, New Zealand, Fiji, the Philippines, Malaya, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. (p. xiv)

The first philosopher since Aristotle to be an expert in both metaphysics and ornithology (Dombrowski 2024).

Do birds express an aesthetic sense in their songs? Or, has the analogy between bird music and human music any biological significance? Forerunners regarding biomusicology aesthetics:

  • Edward A. Armstrong (1963)
  • William H. Thorpe (1961)

Guiding ideas of Hartshorne's studies in this book:

  • Explore further two possibilities for evolutionary theory concerning the musical sensibility and capability characterizing man
    • it is entirely unique to human life; there are precedents or analogies in the older forms of animal life
    • Natural phenomena fall into certain regularities - at least statistical regularities, there has chance and disorder as well. He believes that the recognition of randomness by physicists is reasonable and that the limitations to causal order are greater than quantum physics allows.
  • Seek the general order of nonhuman singing, guess and then test additional general truths about animal music, especially bird song.

bibliography of naming birds followed in this book:

  • Peters' Check-list of Birds of the World
  • Vaurie's The Birds of the Palearctic Fauna
  • Eisenmann's The Species of Middle American Birds
  • Meyer de Schauensee' Birds of South America with Their Distribution

evolutionary theory:

  • offer no opinions
  • Hartshorne dealt with those special aspects of the question regarding the cosmic order which can be affected by the facts of “animal music” and bird song.

Themes:

  • Philosophy:
    • Chap 1, The Aesthetic Analogy as Scientific Hypothesis
    • Chap 12, Some Conclusions and Unsolved Problems
  • Speculative:
    • Chap 6
    • Chap 8
  • Ornithology:
    • Chap 7-11