School
Process philosophy
Process philosophy is the view that change, events and becoming, rather than enduring substances, are the basic features of reality.
It looks back to Heraclitus, and its main modern forms are Henri Bergson's philosophy of duration, developed in France around 1900, and A. N. Whitehead's Process and Reality (1929), written at Harvard. Whitehead described the world as made of interrelated actual occasions of experience, and his ideas were taken up in process theology by Charles Hartshorne and others. On this site process philosophy answers questions on substance theory (1.1.1), which asks whether a river is a thing or an event, and on the philosophy of time.
Thinkers of this school
Guide: Schools of Philosophy: The Main -isms and the Questions They Answer
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Is the flame on my burner a thing, or something that keeps happening?
I run a kitchen in Dubai, twenty-two cooks, nine countries, and on a slow afternoon I was staring at a gas flame. It keeps the same shape and colour for hours, but nothing in it stays: the gas comes in, burns, and…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Cutting film taught me that clock time and lived time are different things
I cut documentaries in Tehran. A shot of a woman pouring tea can last eight seconds and feel like a minute, or last eight seconds and pass unnoticed, depending on what came before it. Every editor knows this. The clock and the…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam3 replies -
Nobody from our founding team is left. Is it still the same company?
I left the startup I co-founded about eighteen months ago, burnt out. Last week I visited. The twelve people who started it are all gone, including me. The product has been rewritten twice. The office moved from a flat in Andheri to…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
The deepest split in metaphysics is substance versus process, not matter versus mind
I want to defend a claim I came across in a comparative table of answers to "what is real?" across traditions. Most introductions organise metaphysics around matter versus mind: materialism, idealism, dualism. That division is real, but it's largely a European early-modern…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies