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: Process Philosophy | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy





Process Philosophy
Process philosophy is a longstanding philosophical tradition that emphasizes becoming and changing over static being. Though present in many historical and cultural periods, the term “process philosophy” is primarily associated with the work of the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000). Process philosophy is characterized by an attempt to reconcile the diverse intuitions found in human experience (such as religious, scientific, and aesthetic) into a coherent holistic scheme. Process philosophy seeks a return to a neo-classical realism that avoids subjectivism. This reconciliation of the intuitions of objectivity and subjectivity, with a concern for scientific findings, produces the explicitly metaphysical speculation that the world, at its most fundamental level, is made up of momentary events of experience rather than enduring material substances. Process philosophy speculates that these momentary events, called “actual occasions” or “actual entities,” are essentially self-determining, experiential, and internally related to each other. Actual occasions correspond to electrons and sub-atomic particles, but also to human persons. The human person is a society of billions of these occasions (that is, the body), which is organized and coordinated by a single dominant occasion (that is, the mind). Thus, process philosophy avoids a strict mind-body dualism. Most process philosophers speculate that God is also an actual entity, though there is an internal debate among process thinkers whether God is a series of momentary actual occasions, like other worldly societies, or a single everlasting and constantly developing actual entity.