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: Process Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Process Philosophy
First published Mon Oct 15, 2012; substantive revision Thu Oct 26, 2017
Process philosophy is based on the premise that being is dynamic and that the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any comprehensive philosophical account of reality and our place within it. Even though we experience our world and ourselves as continuously changing, Western metaphysics has long been obsessed with describing reality as an assembly of static individuals whose dynamic features are either taken to be mere appearances or ontologically secondary and derivative. For process philosophers the adventure of philosophy begins with a set of problems that traditional metaphysics marginalizes or even sidesteps altogether: what is dynamicity or becoming —if it is the way we experience reality, how should we interpret this metaphysically? Are there several varieties of becoming—for instance, the uniform going on of activities versus the coming about of developments? Do all developments have the same way of occurring quite independently of what is coming about? How can we best classify into different kinds of occurrences what is going on and coming about? How can we understand the emergence of apparently novel conditions? While process philosophers insist that all within and about reality is continuously going on and coming about, they do not deny that there are temporally stable and reliably recurrent aspects of reality.