School of thought
Process Philosophy
Intellectual current
Classification
- Period
- c. 1929 CE onward
- Regions
- North America (origin), Europe
- Domains
- Metaphysics, Philosophy of Nature
Overview
Process Philosophy is a diverse current united by treating processes, events, or becoming as metaphysically basic rather than reducing them to changes in static substances. Whitehead and Hartshorne developed different systematic forms of process metaphysics.
Key ideas
- Process Over Substance: The basic units of reality are not enduring things but momentary events (actual occasions) that arise, experience, and perish — reality is a process of becoming, not a collection of beings.
- Prehension: Each actual occasion 'prehends' (grasps, incorporates) previous occasions, creating continuity. Experience is not limited to humans — it extends to the most basic events in nature.
- Creative Advance: The universe is fundamentally creative — each moment brings genuine novelty. Process philosophy rejects determinism and embraces the real openness of the future.
Key figures
Alfred North Whitehead · Charles Hartshorne · Henri Bergson (precursor)
Positions held
Influenced by
- Bergsonism
Whitehead declared himself greatly indebted to Bergson, whose account of duration had already made becoming basic, and set out to rescue that kind of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism.
- German Idealism
Drew on Hegel's dialectical conception of becoming for a metaphysics in which reality is fundamentally process rather than static substance.
- Platonism
Whitehead held that restating Plato's general point of view for two thousand years of later experience would require a philosophy of organism, and he kept Plato's idea of participation: temporal things arise by the ingression of eternal objects, the timeless potentials that give each actual occasion its definite form.
- Pragmatism
References
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Process Philosophy
- Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889)
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929), the system from which the current takes its name and its start date here; Bergson is listed as a precursor
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead, introduction and §§1,6 — Formation: Whitehead developed his mature metaphysics at Harvard from 1924, culminating in Process and Reality (1929).
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929), Preface (indebted to Bergson, William James and John Dewey; the aim of rescuing 'their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism')
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Process Philosophy, §1 'Historical contributions' (Bergson's process metaphysics of duration)
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929), Part II, ch. 1 'Fact and Form', sec. I (the 'footnotes to Plato' passage, and the ingression or 'participation' of eternal things in temporal ones)
- Process and Reality — Alfred North Whitehead
- Creative Evolution — Henri Bergson