Most Famous Process Philosophers
Process philosophy is a metaphysical tradition that takes change, becoming, and dynamic events rather than static substances as the fundamental categories of reality. Its leading figures include Henri Bergson, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Charles Hartshorne, with substantial influence also on Gilles Deleuze and contemporary philosophy of biology. Whitehead's Process and Reality (1929) is the most ambitious systematic statement of the position, set out as an ontology of actual occasions in which experience is a fundamental feature of every level of reality. Process philosophy has shaped process theology, contemporary philosophy of mind, and the metaphysics of contemporary physics and biology. The position contrasts with the substance metaphysics that has been dominant in much of the Western philosophical tradition since Aristotle.
Philosophers in this tradition
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Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead was a British mathematician, logician, and philosopher of the late 19th and 20th centuries. With his student Bertrand Russell he co-authored the monumenta...
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William James
William James was a 19th and early 20th-century American philosopher and psychologist, one of the founders of pragmatism and a central figure in the early development of modern ...
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Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson was a 19th and 20th-century French philosopher, one of the most influential thinkers of the early 20th century and a major figure of continental philosophy in the ...
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Charles Hartshorne
Charles Hartshorne was an American philosopher and the principal interpreter and developer of Whitehead's process metaphysics. After early studies at Harvard with R. B. Perry an...
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John B. Cobb Jr.
John B. Cobb Jr. is an American Process philosopher and theologian, professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, and one of the leading living interpreters of Alfred ...
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Isabelle Stengers
Isabelle Stengers is a Belgian philosopher of science, originally trained as a chemist, and a leading interpreter of Alfred North Whitehead and Ilya Prigogine, with whom she co-...