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: 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. In contrast, process philosophy shows fewer affinities to any particular language group and can allude to a rich tradition of reflection in many of the great schools of Eastern thought. As recently appeared, process philosophy also has an increasing practical dimension, since only if we re-visualize our world as a system of interactions can we come to grips, conceptually and ethically, with the new phenomena of artificial life, artificial intelligence, and artificial sociality, and investigate the exceptionality of human capacities and the scope of moral obligation. Thus contemporary process philosophy holds out the promise of offering superior support for the three most pressing tasks of philosophy at the beginning of the 21st century. First, it provides the category-theoretic tools for an integrated metaphysics that can join our common sense and scientific images of the world. Second, it can serve as a theoretical platform upon which to build an intercultural philosophy and to facilitate interdisciplinary research on global knowledge representation by means of an ontological framework that is no longer parochially Western.