Most of the material is taken from the Stanford University Philosophy Library that has been made available to the general public. It's article on process philosophy is clear, and well-written. For now it serves our purposes, and was used to form this version. Much appreciation to SU.
Process Philosophy
Process philosophy is as dramatic a shift in view as the shift from a geocentric to a solar-centric solar system heralded by Galileo and Copernicus. It's eventual effect was to shift the pre-eminance of religious power to allow secular, scientific beliefs to have a powerful influence on our existence.
It has shifted our viewpoint from being purely anthropomorphic, placing humankind at the centre of the universe - the spiritual one, that is - to being "merely" a player in the Divine Cosmic Drama.
It is similar to projective geometry, which looks at the geometrical object from the outside-in, rather than the inside-out, by deriving it from the viewpoint of infinity, rather from the viewpoint of the object itself.
Thus we look at first at the events that produce us - rather than describing the perception we have of the events that occur around us.
Dynamic
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.
Thus, the first and most important characteristic of process philosophy is that it is dynamic.
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.
Process
Process is a basic entity that is individuated in terms of what it ‘does.’
In order to develop a taxonomy of dynamic beings (types and modes of occurrences), processists replace the descriptive concepts of substance metaphysics with a set of new basic categories. Central among these is the notion of a basic entity that is individuated in terms of what it ‘does.’ This type of functionally individuated entity is often labelled ‘process’ in a technical sense of this term that does not coincide with our common-sense notion of a process. Some of the ‘processes’ postulated by process philosophers are in agreement with our common-sense understanding of processes — temporal developments that can be analysed as temporally structured sequences of stages of an occurrence, with each such stage being numerically and qualitatively different from any other. But some of the ‘processes’ that process philosophers operate with are not temporal developments in this sense — they are, for example, temporal but non-developmental occurrences like activities, or non-spatiotemporal happenings that realize themselves in a developmental fashion and thereby constitute the directionality of time.
What holds for all dynamic entities labelled ‘processes,’ however, is that they occur—that they are somehow or other intimately connected to time, and often, though not necessarily, related to the directionality or the passage of time.
Form
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. But they take such aspects of persistence to be the regular behaviour of dynamic organizations that arise due to the continuously ongoing interaction of processes. These are referred to as Points of Stability.
In order to articulate a process view of reality, special theoretical efforts are required, however, since the standard theoretical tools of Western metaphysics are geared to the static view of reality. Especially the standard interpretation of predicate logic in terms of static individuals with properties that are exemplified timelessly or at a temporal instant consolidates what is from the process-philosophical perspective an unhelpful theoretical bias. This has forced upon process philosophy a double role as metaphysical and metaphilosophical enterprise—pushing for a paradigm change, process philosophy has the double task of developing new explanatory concepts and providing arguments for why these concepts better serve the aims of philosophy.
Becoming
In some process accounts, becoming is the mode of being common to the many kinds of occurrences or dynamic beings. Other process accounts hold that being is ongoing self-differentiation; on these accounts becoming is both the mode of being of different kinds of dynamic beings and the process that generates different kinds of dynamic beings.
Constant becoming
Process philosophy's concern is with the dynamic sense of being as becoming or occurrence.
The conditions of spatio-temporal existence, the kinds of dynamic entities, the relationship between mind and world, and the realization of values in action are all under discussion. The wide range of approaches to the subject share the guiding idea that natural existence consists in modes of becoming and types of occurrences.
‘Processists’ agree that the world is an assembly of physical, organic, social, and cognitive processes that interact at and across levels of dynamic organization._
Substance Metaphysics
Process philosophy opposes substance metaphysics
Substance metaphysics has been the dominant research paradigm in the history of Western philosophy since Aristotle. Substance metaphysics proceeds from the intuition — first formulated by the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides — that being should be thought of as simple, hence as internally undifferentiated and unchangeable. Substance metaphysicians recast this intuition as the claim that the primary units of reality (called “substances”) must be static — they must be what they are at any instant in time (time invariant). In contrast to the substance-metaphysical snapshot view of reality, with its typical focus on eternalist being and on what there is, process philosophers analyse becoming and what is occurring as well as ways of occurring.
Process Metaphysics
If we admit that the basic entities of our world are processes, we can generate better philosophical descriptions of all the kinds of entities and relationships we are committed to when we reason about our world in common sense and in science: from quantum entanglement to consciousness, from computation to feelings, from things to institutions, from organisms to societies, from traffic jams to climate change, from spacetime to beauty.
Moreover, results in cognitive science, some philosophers have claimed, show that we need a process metaphysics in order to develop a naturalist theory of the mind and of normativity.
The bias towards substances seems to be rooted partly in the cognitive dispositions of speakers of Indo-European languages, and partly in theoretical habituation, as the traditional prioritization of static entities (substances, objects, states of affairs, static structures) at the beginning of Western metaphysics built on itself. In contrast, process philosophy shows fewer affinities to any particular language group and can allude to a rich tradition of reflection in many of the great schools of Eastern thought. As recently appeared, process philosophy also has an increasing practical dimension, since only if we re-visualize our world as a system of interactions can we come to grips, conceptually and ethically, with the new phenomena of artificial life, artificial intelligence, and artificial sociality, and investigate the exceptionality of human capacities and the scope of moral obligation. Thus contemporary process philosophy holds out the promise of offering superior support for the three most pressing tasks of philosophy at the beginning of the 21st century.
- It provides the category-theoretic tools for an integrated metaphysics that can join our common sense and scientific images of the world.
- It can serve as a theoretical platform upon which to build an intercultural philosophy and to facilitate interdisciplinary research on global knowledge representation by means of an ontological framework that is no longer parochially Western.
- It supplies concepts that facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration on reflected technology development, and enable the cultural and ethical imagination needed to shape the expectable deep socio-cultural changes engendered by the increased use of technology, especially automation.