Process Philosophy

Process philosophy is the metaphysical framework developed by Alfred North Whitehead, most fully in his 1929 Process and Reality, which holds that reality is fundamentally constituted not by enduring substances that merely undergo change but by momentary events of "becoming," which Whitehead called actual occasions, each of which arises by creatively synthesizing (or "prehending") the influence of prior events before perishing and giving way to new occasions. On this view, apparently stable objects and persons are not unchanging substances but ordered societies of successive actual occasions bound together by continuity of pattern, so that process rather than persisting substance is treated as the basic category of existence, reversing a metaphysical assumption traceable back to Aristotle. Whitehead's system incorporates a distinctive concept of God as both shaping each occasion's process of becoming by offering it an "initial aim" and as itself changed by the world's ongoing creativity, a "dipolar" theology that decisively influenced the later theological movement known as process theology, developed by Charles Hartshorne and others. Though it never achieved the mainstream standing of analytic metaphysics in twentieth-century Anglophone philosophy, process philosophy has sustained an active following, particularly in philosophy of religion, environmental philosophy and philosophy of biology, for its alternative to substance-based metaphysics and its emphasis on interrelation and creativity.