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: This association was popularized among those theologians and philosophers of the mid-century “Chicago School.” For this reason, the remainder of this essay will primarily focus on the Whiteheadian-Hartshornean school of process philosophy. Contemporary philosophers in this school include Lewis Ford, David Ray Griffin, Robert Neville, Victor Lowe, Donald Sherburne, Donald Wayne Viney, Jude Jones, John Lango, Daniel Dombrowski, Randall Auxier, and C. Robert Mesle, among others. Notable characteristics of this variant of process philosophy are its (1) method of metaphysical speculation, (2) event (rather than substance) ontology, (3) assertion of panpsychism or panexperientialism, (4) description of “prehension” in place of perception, and (5) panentheist doctrine of God. 2. Assumptions and Method
a. In Pursuit of a Holistic Worldview
Whitehead begins the preface to his Science and the Modern World (1925) by noting that the human intuitions of science, aesthetics, ethics, and religion each make a positive contribution to the worldview of a community. In each historical period, any one or combination of these intuitions may receive emphasis and thus influence the dominant worldview of its people. It is a peculiar characteristic of the last three (now four) centuries that scientific pursuits have come to dominate the worldview of Western minds. For this reason, Whitehead seeks to establish a comprehensive cosmology—understood here in the sense of a systematic descriptive theory of the world—that does justice to all of the human intuitions and not only the scientific ones. Toward this end, Whitehead argues that philosophy is the “critic of cosmologies,” whose job it is to synthesize, scrutinize and make coherent the divergent intuitions gained through ethical, aesthetic, religious, and scientific experience.