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: In Eastern traditions, many Taoist and Buddhist doctrines can be classified as “process.” For example, the Taoist admonition that one should be spontaneously receptive to the never ending flux of yin and yang emphasizes a process worldview, as do the Buddhist notions of pratyitya-samutpada (the inter-dependent origination of events) and anatma (the denial of a substantial or enduring self). More recently on the continent, one finds process philosophers in Hegel, who saw the history of the world as processive and dialectic unfolding of Absolute Spirit and in Gottfried Leibniz, Henri Bergson, Nikolai Berdyaev, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Even David Hume (insofar as he rejected the idea of a substantial self in favor of a series of unconnected perceptual “bundles”) can be considered a process philosopher. Process Philosophy found its most fertile ground and active development in 20th century North America. American philosophers Samuel Alexander, George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, C.S. Peirce, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and others continue this tradition. Peirce’s philosophy is process-oriented in several respects. He defines truth as the unattainable goal of a never-ending process of inquiry. Likewise, Peirce’s semiology indicates that the meaning of signs is always triangulated between an object, its sign, and the infinite series of “interpretants” or subjective impressions made by the sign upon human knowers. Thus, Peirce correlates meaning with an ongoing and indeterminate historical process interpretation.