Title: Process Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Headings: Process Philosophy
Process Philosophy
1. Historical contributions
2. Three tasks of process philosophy
3. Beyond traditional ‘bifurcations’: process-philosophical approaches to old questions
4. Tracking science: new topics for process philosophy
5. Current challenges
6. The ultimate question: is reality directed?
7. Institutionalization
Bibliography
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Acknowledgments

Content: Some of the ‘processes’ postulated by process philosophers are—in agreement with our common-sense understanding of processes— temporal developments that can be analyzed as temporally structured sequences of stages of an occurrence, with each such stage being numerically and qualitatively different from any other. But some of the ‘processes’ that process philosophers operate with are not temporal developments in this sense—they are, for example, temporal but non-developmental occurrences like activities, or non-spatiotemporal happenings that realize themselves in a developmental fashion and thereby constitute the directionality of time. What holds for all dynamic entities labelled ‘processes,’ however, is that they occur —that they are somehow or other intimately connected to time, and often, though not necessarily, related to the directionality or the passage of time. Process philosophers claim that there are many sound philosophical reasons to take the processual aspects of nature, cognition, and action as fundamental features of the real. The perhaps most powerful argument for process philosophy is its wide descriptive or explanatory scope. If we admit that the basic entities of our world are processes, we can generate better philosophical descriptions of all the kinds of entities and relationships we are committed to when we reason about our world in common sense and in science: from quantum entanglement to consciousness, from computation to feelings, from things to institutions, from organisms to societies, from traffic jams to climate change, from spacetime to beauty. Moreover, results in cognitive science, some philosophers have claimed, show that we need a process metaphysics in order to develop a naturalist theory of the mind and of normativity. These arguments form the background for the processist criticism of the focus on substance in Western philosophy. The bias towards substances seems to be rooted partly in the cognitive dispositions of speakers of Indo-European languages, and partly in theoretical habituation, as the traditional prioritization of static entities (substances, objects, states of affairs, static structures) at the beginning of Western metaphysics built on itself.