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
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Acknowledgments

Content: are contributions to ‘process philosophy’ more broadly conceived as a research paradigm of philosophical inquiry. They share the guiding idea that natural existence consists in modes of becoming and types of occurrences. ‘ Processists’ agree that the world is an assembly of physical, organic, social, and cognitive processes that interact at and across levels of dynamic organization. However, within that broad framework, process philosophers debate about how such a world of processes is to be construed, how it relates to the human mind (which is another process) and how the dynamic nature of reality relates to our scientific theories. In consequence, process philosophers also differ in their view on the role of philosophy itself and in their choice of theoretical style. Process philosophy opposes ‘substance metaphysics,’ the dominant research paradigm in the history of Western philosophy since Aristotle. Substance metaphysics proceeds from the intuition—first formulated by the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides—that being should be thought of as simple, hence as internally undifferentiated and unchangeable. Substance metaphysicians recast this intuition as the claim that the primary units of reality  (called “substances”) must be static—they must be what they are at any instant in time. In contrast to the substance-metaphysical snapshot view of reality, with its typical focus on eternalist being and on what there is, process philosophers analyze becoming and what is occurring as well as ways of occurring. In some process accounts, becoming is the mode of being common to the many kinds of occurrences or dynamic beings.