SEP article on Process Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/#pagetopright
Extracts:
“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. 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. For process philosophers the adventure of philosophy begins with a set of problems that traditional metaphysics marginalizes or even sidesteps altogether: what is the role of mind in our experience of reality as becoming? Are there several varieties of becoming — for instance, the uniform going on of activities versus the coming about of developments? Do all developments have the same way of occurring quite independently of what is coming about? How can we best classify into different kinds of occurrences what is going on and coming about? How can we understand the emergence of apparently novel conditions?
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 behavior of dynamic organizations that arise due to the continuously ongoing interaction of processes. In order to articulate a process view of reality, a special theoretical effort is 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, taking up the double task of developing new explanatory concepts and providing arguments for why these concepts better serve the aims of philosophy.
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Process philosophy has full systematic scope: its 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.
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Despite all differences in constructive detail, Whiteheadian and non-Whiteheadian process philosophy both recommend themselves as gateways to renovating philosophical discourse. Here are just a few of the topics where processists promise philosophical advance. (i) Beginning with a familiar Whiteheadian move, the rejection of the traditional “bifurcation of nature” into a physical and a mental domain, the process approach operates like a gestalt switch, opening up new ways of looking at a wide variety of issues. Whiteheadians argue that the traditional mind-body problem dissolves if all basic constituents of reality are short-lived processes of information transfer that exhibit both ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ aspects in different accentuations according to context. (ii) Similarly, as non-Whiteheadian analytical processists have pointed out, process metaphysics reconfigures the traditional problem of universals since it abandons the substance-metaphysical principle that concrete entities are fully determinate while general or indeterminate entities are abstract (i.e., they must not be, undergo, or initiate changes). (iii) Processists also have offered novel approaches to the problem of persistence, either by taking persistent entities to be “enduring” patterns of processes (Whitehead), or by questioning that “perdurance” vs. “endurance” accounts of persistence form a theoretically necessary exclusive dichotomy. (iv) The dichotomy of ‘fact’ and ‘norm,’ some processists argue, is another traditional “bifurcation” that can be bridged. Some natural processes realize a certain form of low-degree normativity. In some process organizations (e.g., far-from-equilibrium systems) each component process presupposes every other for its own occurrence; in the context of these particular process organizations the dependence amongst the single processes is not merely a matter of linear causation but constrained by the simultaneous interactions of the entire system, ensuring that each process is ‘functional for’ the occurrence of the system (Bickhard 2004). (v) Finally, the process approach also makes a difference in the realm of philosophy of religion. While the opposition between “immanence” and “transcendence” traditionally is taken to amount to an exclusive alternative, whether in application to universals or to God, the tools of process metaphysics allow us to pursue a third option that exploits the explanatory grammar of the ‘mode.’ We often consider the mode or way in which a process, or collection of processes, occurs as a separate kind of process (compare, e.g., scratching a violin string with a bow vs. playing a tone on the violin, or free market economy vs. planned economy). Processes that are modifications of other processes are both immanent in the sense that they affect (by constraining and enabling) how the modified processes occur, but are transcendent in the sense that they are multiply realizable, that is, they are not themselves dependent on the particular spatio-temporal occurrences of the processes that realize them.[
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In addition, there is a host of other contemporary issues where forefronting processes generates novel answers and accounts that advance our understanding of the familiar questions of philosophy in important ways, even without challenging some central, defining, dichotomy. One might point here, for example, at the ‘process account of causation’ (Salmon 1984, 1997), at investigations of belief revision and non-monotonic reasoning in epistemic logic. The most important case in point, however, is surely N. Rescher's multifaceted analysis of knowledge, which in combination with a more recently developed process-metaphysical frame, clarify and strengthen the link between a pragmatist and a processist stance. Offering detailed reconstructions of the procedures of knowledge production, Rescher argues that rational inquiry, including science, is the process of creating coherent theories that systematize that which we have established as data with increasing complexity (Rescher 1982). That this method of inquiry can yield (temporary) truths is justified by its practical success, but the method is essentially (a) interminable and (b) progressive, since: (a1) each knowledge claim contains presuppositions that raise new questions; (a2) reality is “cognitively inexhaustible”; and (b) since the increasing complexification of scientific knowledge can count as cognitive progress, even though such progress may not be discernible as cumulative or linear advance (Rescher 1977, 1978, 1984). For claims (a2) and (b) Rescher supplies process-metaphysical underpinnings, endorsing a view of nature as continuously evolving and a view of evolution as directed towards increasing complexity (Rescher 1996, 2006 ch. 10, and 2012; see also below section 5).
Harking back to (Claim 2) and (Claim 3) above, extant process-geared treatments of familiar topics surely provide considerable support for the claim that process philosophy is viable (Claim 2). But in the eyes of many processists (Claim 3) matters most—as the next section will sketch, currently it may be process philosophy's primary asset that it enables us to articulate and address important new questions raised by modern science."
