Process philosophy identifies
metaphysicalMetaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
realityIn philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. In a wider definition, reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible...
with
changeChange may refer to:- The process of becoming different:* Social change* Biological metamorphosis* Change , the mathematical study of change* Percentage change, in statistics* Fold change, in statistics...
and
dynamismDynamism is a metaphysical concept conceived by Gottfried Leibniz and developed into a full system of cosmology. Dynamism in metaphysical cosmology explains the material world in terms of active, pointlike forces, with no extension but with action at a distance...
. Since the time of
PlatoPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
and
AristotleAristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, philosophers have posited true reality as "timeless", based on permanent
substanceSubstance theory, or substance attribute theory, is an ontological theory about objecthood, positing that a substance is distinct from its properties. A thing-in-itself is a property-bearer that must be distinguished from the properties it bears....
s, whilst processes are denied or subordinated to timeless substances. If
Socrates Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
changes, becoming sick, Socrates is still the same (the substance of Socrates being the same), and change (his sickness) only glides over his substance: change is accidental, whereas the substance is essential. Therefore, classic
ontologyOntology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
denies any full reality to change, which is conceived as only accidental and not essential. This classical ontology is what made knowledge and a theory of knowledge possible, as it was thought that a science of something in becoming was an impossible feat to achieve.
In opposition to the classical model of change as purely accidental and illusory (as by Aristotle), process philosophy regards change as the cornerstone of reality–the cornerstone of the Being thought as Becoming. Modern philosophers who appeal to process rather than substance include
Martin HeideggerMartin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
, Charles Peirce,
John DeweyJohn Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
,
Alfred North WhiteheadAlfred North Whitehead, OM FRS was an English mathematician who became a philosopher. He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of science, physics, metaphysics, and education...
,
Charles HartshorneCharles Hartshorne was a prominent American philosopher who concentrated primarily on the philosophy of religion and metaphysics. He developed the neoclassical idea of God and produced a modal proof of the existence of God that was a development of St. Anselm's Ontological Argument...
, and
Nicholas RescherNicholas Rescher is an American philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh. In a productive research career extending over six decades, Rescher has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style and author of a system of pragmatic idealism which weaves together threads of...
. In physics
Ilya PrigogineIlya, Viscount Prigogine was a Russian-born naturalized Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.-Biography :...
distinguishes between the "physics of being" and the "physics of becoming".
In Ancient Greek thought
The formal development of this theory begins with
HeraclitusHeraclitus of Ephesus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom...
's fragments in which he posits the
nousNous , also called intellect or intelligence, is a philosophical term for the faculty of the human mind which is described in classical philosophy as necessary for understanding what is true or real, very close in meaning to intuition...
, the ground of Becoming, as agon, or "strife of opposites" as the underlying basis of all reality defined by change. That balance and conflict were the foundations of change and stability in the flux of existence.
Twentieth century
In early twentieth century
philosophy of mathematicsThe philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. The aim of the philosophy of mathematics is to provide an account of the nature and methodology of mathematics and to understand the place of...
, it was undertaken to develop mathematics as an airtight axiomatic system, in which every truth could be derived logically from a set of axioms. In the
foundations of mathematicsFoundations of mathematics is a term sometimes used for certain fields of mathematics, such as mathematical logic, axiomatic set theory, proof theory, model theory, type theory and recursion theory...
, this project is variously understood as
logicismLogicism is one of the schools of thought in the philosophy of mathematics, putting forth the theory that mathematics is an extension of logic and therefore some or all mathematics is reducible to logic. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead championed this theory fathered by Richard Dedekind...
or as part of the formalist program of
David HilbertDavid Hilbert was a German mathematician. He is recognized as one of the most influential and universal mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many areas, including invariant theory and the axiomatization of...
.
Alfred North WhiteheadAlfred North Whitehead, OM FRS was an English mathematician who became a philosopher. He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of science, physics, metaphysics, and education...
and
Bertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
attempted to complete, or at least greatly facilitate, this program with their seminal book
Principia MathematicaThe Principia Mathematica is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics, written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913...
, which purported to build a logically consistent set theory on which to found mathematics. This project may have been ultimately defeasible, and afterwards Whitehead intuited that the entire venture was an organ of an overarching ontological mistake. He saw that science and mathematics were struggling to overcome an ontology of substances, and thus could not engage phenomena whose nature are more properly understood as 'process'. This resulted in the most famous work of process philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead's
Process and RealityIn philosophy, especially metaphysics, the book Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead sets out its author's philosophy of organism, also called process philosophy...
, 1929, a work which continues that begun by Hegel but describing a more complex and fluid dynamic ontology. While process thought does describe truth as "movement" in and through determinates (Hegelian truth), and not these determinates as fixed concepts or "things" (
AristotelianAristotelianism is a tradition of philosophy that takes its defining inspiration from the work of Aristotle. The works of Aristotle were initially defended by the members of the Peripatetic school, and, later on, by the Neoplatonists, who produced many commentaries on Aristotle's writings...
truth), process thought since Whitehead is distinguished from Hegel in describing complexes of occasions of experience that arise or coalesce in becoming, rather than being simply dialectically determined from prior posited determinates. It is also distinguished in being not necessarily conflictual or oppositional in operation. Process may be integrative, destructive or both together, allowing for aspects of interdependence, influence, and confluence, and addressing coherence in universal as well as particular developments, which aspects are not condign to Hegel's system. Additionally, instances of determinate occasions of experience, while always ephemeral, are nonetheless seen as important to define the type and continuity of those occasions of experience that flow from or relate to them.
Whitehead's Process and Reality
Whitehead's background was an unusual one for a speculative metaphysician. Educated as a mathematician, he became, through his coauthorship and 1913 publication of
Principia MathematicaThe Principia Mathematica is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics, written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913...
with
Bertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
, a major logician. Later he wrote extensively on physics and its philosophy, proposing a theory of relativity intended to rival Einstein's. He was conversant with the
quantum mechanicsQuantum mechanics, also known as quantum physics or quantum theory, is a branch of physics providing a mathematical description of much of the dual particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter. It departs from classical mechanics primarily at the atomic and subatomic...
that emerged in the 1920s. Whitehead did not begin teaching and writing on process and metaphysics until he joined Harvard at 63 years of age.
Whitehead's influences were not restricted to philosophers or physicists or mathematicians. He was influenced by the French philosopher
Henri-Louis BergsonHenri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize...
(1859–1941), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Process philosophy is also believed to have influenced some 20th century modernists, such as
D. H. LawrenceDavid Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
,
William FaulknerWilliam Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
and
Charles OlsonCharles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...
.
Process metaphysics
The process metaphysics elaborated in Process and Reality posits an ontology which is based on the notions of an actual entity and of an abstraction.
The ultimate principle of existence for Whitehead is creativity. It is manifest in what can be called 'singular causality'. This term may be contrasted with the term 'nomic causality'. An example of singular causation is that I woke this morning because my alarm clock rang. An example of nomic causation is that alarm clocks generally wake people in the morning. Aristotle recognizes singular causality as efficient causality. For Whitehead, there are many contributory singular causes for an event. A further singular cause of my being awoken by my alarm clock this morning was that I was lying asleep near it till it rang.
An actual entity is a general name for an utterly determinate and completely concrete individual particular of the world or universe of changeable entities considered in terms of singular causality, about which categorical statements can be made. Whitehead's most far-reaching and profound and radical contribution to metaphysics is his invention of a better way of choosing the actual entities. Whitehead chooses a way of defining the actual entities that makes them all alike, qua actual entities, with a single exception.
For example, for
AristotleAristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, the actual entities were the substances, such as Socrates and Bucephalus. Besides Aristotle's ontology of substances, another example of an ontology that posits actual entities is in the
monadsThe Monadology is one of Gottfried Leibniz’s best known works representing his later philosophy. It is a short text which sketches in some 90 paragraphs a metaphysics of simple substances, or monads.- Text :...
of
LeibnizGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher and mathematician. He wrote in different languages, primarily in Latin , French and German ....
, which are said to be 'windowless'.
Whitehead's actual entities
For Whitehead, actual entities are of two kinds, temporal and atemporal. There is only one atemporal actual entity for Whitehead: God. All other actual entities for Whitehead are temporal and are occasions of experience (which are not to be confused with
consciousnessConsciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
). According to this notion, what people commonly think of as concrete
objectAn object in philosophy is a technical term often used in contrast to the term subject. Consciousness is a state of cognition that includes the subject, which can never be doubted as only it can be the one who doubts, and some object or objects that may or may not have real existence without...
s are actually composed of indefinitely many occasions of experience. A human being is thus composed of indefinitely many occasions of experience. God is at once an actual entity and an atemporal entity, and objectively immortal, as well as being immanent in the world, and He is objectified in each temporal actual entity; but He is not an eternal object.
According to Whitehead, the occasions of experience are of four grades. The first grade comprises processes in a physical vacuum such as the propagation of an electromagnetic wave across empty space. The occasions of experience of the second grade involve just inanimate matter. The occasions of experience of the third grade involve living organisms. Occasions of experience of the fourth grade involve experience in the mode of presentational immediacy, which means more or less what are often called the
qualiaQualia , singular "quale" , from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to refer to subjective conscious experiences as 'raw feels'. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the...
of subjective experience. So far as we know, experience in the mode of presentational immediacy occurs in only more evolved animals. That some occasions of experience involve experience in the mode of presentational immediacy is the one and only reason why Whitehead makes the occasions of experience his actual entities. Nevertheless, it is inessential that an occasion of experience have an aspect in the mode presentational immediacy; occasions in the grades one, two, and three, lack that aspect.
There is no mind-matter duality in this ontology, because "mind" is simply seen as an abstraction from an occasion of experience which has also a material aspect, which is of course simply another abstraction from it; thus the mental aspect and the material aspect are abstractions from one and the same concrete occasion of experience. The brain is part of the body. Though not recognized by Aristotle, there is biological evidence, written about by
GalenAelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus , better known as Galen of Pergamon , was a prominent Roman physician, surgeon and philosopher...
, that the human brain is an essential seat of human experience in the mode of presentational immediacy. We may say that the brain has a material and a mental aspect.
Each Whiteheadean occasion of experience is consequential on every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time, and has as its consequences every other occasion of experience that follows it in time; thus it has been said that Whitehead's occasions of experience are 'all window', in contrast to Leibniz's 'windowless' monads. Inherent in Whitehead's conception is the notion of time; all experiences are influenced by prior experiences, and will influence all future experiences. This process of influencing is never deterministic; an occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other experiences, and then a reaction to it. This is the process in process philosophy. Because no process is ever deterministic,
free will"To make my own decisions whether I am successful or not due to uncontrollable forces" -Troy MorrisonA pragmatic definition of free willFree will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long...
is essential and inherent to the universe.
The causal outcomes obey the usual well-respected rule that the causes precede the effects in time. Some pairs of processes cannot be connected by cause-and-effect relations, and they are said to be spatially separated. This in perfect agreement with the viewpoint of the Einstein theory of
special relativitySpecial relativity is the physical theory of measurement in an inertial frame of reference proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein in the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".It generalizes Galileo's...
and with the
Minkowski geometryIn physics and mathematics, Minkowski space or Minkowski spacetime is the mathematical setting in which Einstein's theory of special relativity is most conveniently formulated...
of spacetime. It is clear that Whitehead respected these ideas, as may be seen for example in his 1919 book An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge as well as in Process and Reality.
The actual entities of Whitehead, the occasions of experience, are atomic in the sense that an occasion of experience cannot be cut into two other occasions of experience.
This is because occasions of experience have some topological character, expressed in Whitehead's theory of extension. Fundamental to both Newtonian and to quantum theoretical mechanics is the concept of velocity. The measurement of a velocity requires a finite spatiotemporal extent. Because it has no finite spatiotemporal extent, a single point of Minkowski space cannot be an occasion of experience, but is an abstraction from an infinite set of occasions of experience, as explained in Process and Reality. Whitehead did not define the topology of his actual entities in modern terms, but it seems that he envisaged them as convex or 'oval' sets in Minkowski space. The open sets of the path topology, explained by Naber, cannot be occasions of experience because they are centred on a single spatially isolated point of an underlying Minkowski space in a way that makes them very far from 'oval'. In one view, the occasions of experience have a topology in which they are the open sets, each defined by two points with timelike separation in an underlying Minkowski space. The initial of the two points has a forward light cone and the final of them has a backward light cone; the intersection of these two light cones can be used as the extensive definition of an occasion of experience as an open set. Such an open set cannot be cut into two constituent open sets with the same structure, and that is the meaning of its atomicity. The essence here is that an occasion of experience comprises a finite extent of space time and can be the extensional 'receptacle' of a process. Though the occasions of experience are atomic, they are not necessarily separate in extension, spatiotemporally, from one another. Indefinitely many occasions of experience can overlap in Minkowski space. An example of a nexus of overlapping occasions of experience is what Whitehead calls an enduring physical object, which corresponds closely with an Aristotelian substance.
Another aspect of the atomicity of occasions of experience is that they do not change. An actual entity is what it is. An occasion of experience can be described as a process of change, but it is itself unchangeable.
Whitehead's abstractions
An abstraction is an idea that involves more than one single actual entity. Whitehead's ontology refers to importantly structured collections of actual entities as nexuses of actual entities. Collection of actual entities into a nexus emphasizes some aspect of those entities, and that emphasis is an abstraction, because it means that some aspects of the actual entities are de-emphasized or dragged away from their actuality. Whitehead's ontological principle is that whatever reality belongs to an abstraction is derived from the actual entities that comprise it. Many abstractions are potential ingredients of processes.
Whitehead admitted indefinitely many eternal objects. An example of an eternal object is a number, such as the number 'two'. Whitehead held that all eternal objects are abstractions. For Whitehead, a process may be considered as a concrescence of ingredient eternal objects or abstractions which is also a causal outcome from, or effect of, temporally previous processes. Many eternal objects are potential ingredients of actual entities. God is ingredient in every temporal actual entity.
Further aspects
However, Whitehead is not an
idealistIn philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
in the strict sense. Whitehead's ideas were a significant development of the idea of
panpsychismIn philosophy, panpsychism is the view that all matter has a mental aspect, or, alternatively, all objects have a unified center of experience or point of view...
(also known as panexperientialism, because of Whitehead’s emphasis on experience).
Process philosophy, for some, gives God a special place in the universe of occasions of experience. God encompasses all the other occasions of experience but also transcends them; thus Whitehead embraces
panentheismPanentheism is a belief system which posits that God exists, interpenetrates every part of nature and timelessly extends beyond it...
. Since, it is argued, free will is inherent to the nature of the universe, God is not omnipotent in Whitehead's metaphysics. God's role is to offer enhanced occasions of experience. God participates in the evolution of the universe by offering possibilities, which may be accepted or rejected. Whitehead's thinking here has given rise to
process theologyProcess theology is a school of thought influenced by the metaphysical process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and further developed by Charles Hartshorne . While there are process theologies that are similar, but unrelated to the work of Whitehead the term is generally applied to the...
, whose prominent advocates include
Charles HartshorneCharles Hartshorne was a prominent American philosopher who concentrated primarily on the philosophy of religion and metaphysics. He developed the neoclassical idea of God and produced a modal proof of the existence of God that was a development of St. Anselm's Ontological Argument...
, John B. Cobb, Jr., and
Hans JonasHans Jonas was a German-born philosopher who was, from 1955 to 1976, Alvin Johnson Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City.Jonas's writings were very influential in different spheres...
, who was also influenced by the non-theological philosopher Martin Heidegger. However, other process philosophers have questioned Whitehead's theology, seeing it as a regressive Platonism.
Whitehead enumerated three essential natures of God. The primordial nature of God consists of all potentialities of existence for actual occasions, which Whitehead dubbed eternal objects. God can offer possibilities by ordering the relevance of eternal objects. The consequent nature of God prehends everything that happens in reality. As such, God experiences all of reality in a sentient manner. The last nature is the superjective. This is the way in which God’s synthesis becomes a sense-datum for other actual entities. In some sense, God is prehended by existing actual entities.
Process philosophy since Whitehead
Several fields of science and especially
medicineMedicine is the science and art of healing. It encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness....
seem to make liberal use of ideas in process philosophy, notably the theory of
painPain is an unpleasant sensation often caused by intense or damaging stimuli such as stubbing a toe, burning a finger, putting iodine on a cut, and bumping the "funny bone."...
and
healingPhysiological healing is the restoration of damaged living tissue, organs and biological system to normal function. It is the process by which the cells in the body regenerate and repair to reduce the size of a damaged or necrotic area....
of the late 20th century. The philosophy of medicine began to deviate somewhat from
scientific methodScientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
and an emphasis on repeatable results in the very late 20th century by embracing population thinking, and a more pragmatic approach to issues in
public healthPublic health is "the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals" . It is concerned with threats to health based on population health...
,
environmental healthEnvironmental health is the branch of public health that is concerned with all aspects of the natural and built environment that may affect human health...
and especially
mental healthMental health describes either a level of cognitive or emotional well-being or an absence of a mental disorder. From perspectives of the discipline of positive psychology or holism mental health may include an individual's ability to enjoy life and procure a balance between life activities and...
. In this latter field, R. D. Laing,
Thomas SzaszThomas Stephen Szasz is a psychiatrist and academic. Since 1990 he has been Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York. He is a well-known social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, and of the social...
and
Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
were instrumental in moving medicine away from emphasis on "cures" and towards concepts of individuals in balance with their society, both of which are changing, and against which no benchmarks or finished "cures" were very likely to be measurable.
In
psychologyPsychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, the subject of imagination was again explored more extensively since Whitehead, and the question of feasibility or "eternal objects" of thought became central to the impaired
theory of mindTheory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own...
explorations that framed postmodern
cognitive scienceCognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
. A biological understanding of the most eternal object, that being the emerging of similar but independent cognitive apparatus, led to an obsession with the process "embodiment", that being, the emergence of these
cognitionIn science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
s. Like Whitehead's God, especially as elaborated in
J. J. GibsonJames Jerome Gibson , was an American psychologist, born in McConnelsville, Ohio, who received his Ph.D. from Princeton University's Department of Psychology, and is considered one of the most important 20th century psychologists in the field of visual perception...
's
perceptual psychologyPerceptual psychology is a subfield of cognitive psychology that is concerned specifically with the pre-conscious innate aspects of the human cognitive system: perception....
emphasizing
affordanceAn affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action. For example, a knob affords twisting, and perhaps pushing, while a cord affords pulling...
s, by ordering the relevance of eternal objects (especially the cognitions of other such actors), the world becomes. Or, it becomes simple enough for human beings to begin to make choices, and to prehend what happens as a result. These experiences may be summed in some sense but can only approximately be shared, even among very similar cognitions with identical DNA. An early explorer of this view was
Alan TuringAlan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...
who sought to prove the limits of expressive complexity of human genes in the late 1940s, to put bounds on the complexity of human intelligence and so assess the feasibility of
artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
emerging. Since 2000, Process Psychology has progressed as an independent academic and therapeutic discipline.
In the
philosophy of mathematicsThe philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. The aim of the philosophy of mathematics is to provide an account of the nature and methodology of mathematics and to understand the place of...
, some of Whitehead's ideas re-emerged in combination with
cognitivismCognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false , which noncognitivists deny...
as the cognitive science of mathematics and embodied mind theses.
Somewhat earlier, exploration of
mathematical practiceMathematical practice is used to distinguish the working practices of professional mathematicians from the end result of proven and published theorems.-Quasi-empiricism:This distinction is...
and
quasi-empiricism in mathematicsQuasi-empiricism in mathematics is the attempt in the philosophy of mathematics to direct philosophers' attention to mathematical practice, in particular, relations with physics, social sciences, and computational mathematics, rather than solely to issues in the foundations of mathematics...
from the 1950s to 1980s had sought alternatives to
metamathematicsMetamathematics is the study of mathematics itself using mathematical methods. This study produces metatheories, which are mathematical theories about other mathematical theories...
in social behaviours around
mathematicsMathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
itself: for instance,
Paul ErdősPaul Erdős was a Hungarian mathematician. Erdős published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. He worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory...
's simultaneous belief in
PlatonismPlatonism is the philosophy of Plato or the name of other philosophical systems considered closely derived from it. In a narrower sense the term might indicate the doctrine of Platonic realism...
and a single "big book" in which all proofs existed, combined with his personal obsessive need or decision to collaborate with the widest possible number of other mathematicians. The process, rather than the outcomes, seemed to drive his explicit behaviour and odd use of language, e.g., he called God the "Supreme Fascist", echoing the role Whitehead assigned, as if the synthesis of Erdős and collaborators in seeking proofs, creating sense-datum for other mathematicians, was itself the expression of a divine will. Certainly, Erdős behaved as if nothing else in the world mattered, including money or love, as emphasized in his biography
The Man Who Loved Only NumbersThe Man Who Loved Only Numbers is a biography of the famous mathematician Paul Erdős written by Paul Hoffman. It was first published in 1998 as a hardcover edition. A paperback edition appeared in 1999. The book is, in the words of the author, "a work in oral history based on the recollections of...
.
In
plant morphologyPlant morphology or phytomorphology is the study of the physical form and external structure of plants. This is usually considered distinct from plant anatomy, which is the study of the internal structure of plants, especially at the microscopic level...
,
Rolf SattlerRolf Sattler, Ph.D., D.Sc. , F.L.S., F.R.S.C., is a Canadian plant morphologist, biologist, philosopher, and educator. He is considered one of the most significant contributors to the field of plant morphology. His contributions are not only empirical but involved also a revision of the most...
developed a process morphology (dynamic morphology) that overcomes the structure/process (or structure/function) dualism that is commonly taken for granted in biology. According to process morphology, structures such as leaves of plants do not have processes, they are processes.
See also
- Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break...
- Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize...
- Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
- Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
- Wilmon Henry Sheldon
-Life and career:Sheldon was educated at Harvard University and taught at Yale.-References:...
- Gilbert Simondon
Gilbert Simondon was a French philosopher best known for his theory of individuation, a major source of inspiration for Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler.- Career :...
- Process theology
Process theology is a school of thought influenced by the metaphysical process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and further developed by Charles Hartshorne . While there are process theologies that are similar, but unrelated to the work of Whitehead the term is generally applied to the...
- Elisionism
Elisionism is a philosophical standpoint encompassing various social theories. Elisionist theories are diverse, however they are unified in their adherence to process philosophy as well as their assumption that the social and the individual cannot be separated. The term elisionism was coined by...
- David Ray Griffin
David Ray Griffin is a retired American professor of philosophy of religion and theology. Along with John B. Cobb, Jr., he founded the Center for Process Studies in 1973, a research center of Claremont School of Theology which seeks to promote the common good by means of the relational approach...
- Holomovement
The holomovement is a key concept in David Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics and for his overall wordview. It brings together the holistic principle of "undivided wholeness" with the idea that everything is in a state of process or becoming...
- Joseph A. Bracken
- Milič Čapek
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