Title: Process Philosophy | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Headings: Process Philosophy
Process Philosophy
Table of Contents
1. What Counts as Process Philosophy
a. The Perennial Process Tradition
b. The Whitehead-Hartshorne Tradition
2. Assumptions and Method
a. In Pursuit of a Holistic Worldview
b. Neo-Classical Realism
c. Speculative Metaphysics
3. Basic Metaphysics
a. Creativity as Ultimate
b. Events, not Substances
c. Internal and External Relations
d. Rejection of Nominalism
4. The Human Person
a. Panexperientialism with Organizational Duality
b. Perception and Prehension
5. God and the World
a. Dipolar Panentheism
b. Freedom and the Problem of Evil
6. Non-theistic Variations
7. Process Philosophy as Constructive Postmodernism
8. Conclusion
9. References and Further Reading
a. Primary Sources
b. Secondary Sources
Author Information

Content: Assumptions and Method
a. In Pursuit of a Holistic Worldview
Whitehead begins the preface to his Science and the Modern World (1925) by noting that the human intuitions of science, aesthetics, ethics, and religion each make a positive contribution to the worldview of a community. In each historical period, any one or combination of these intuitions may receive emphasis and thus influence the dominant worldview of its people. It is a peculiar characteristic of the last three (now four) centuries that scientific pursuits have come to dominate the worldview of Western minds. For this reason, Whitehead seeks to establish a comprehensive cosmology—understood here in the sense of a systematic descriptive theory of the world—that does justice to all of the human intuitions and not only the scientific ones. Toward this end, Whitehead argues that philosophy is the “critic of cosmologies,” whose job it is to synthesize, scrutinize and make coherent the divergent intuitions gained through ethical, aesthetic, religious, and scientific experience. Process philosophy is frequently used as a conceptual bridge to facilitate discussions between religion, philosophy, and science. b. Neo-Classical Realism
Process philosophy represents an aberration in the history of philosophy, as it rejects the peculiarly Modern practice of beginning with philosophical analysis of the knowing subject and moving outwards toward descriptions of the world. Since Rene Descartes, epistemology (the investigation of the origin, structure, methods and validity of knowledge) has been primary and foundational, while ontology (the study of fundamental principles of being) has been secondary and only attempted once its possibility has been established by epistemological analysis. Process philosophers, however, tend to embrace the reverse, which was more common in classical Greek philosophy. Rather than beginning with subjectivity, process philosophy s