[9] The quotation from Heraclitus appears in Plato's Cratylus twice; first, in 401d:[10] τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδένTa onta ienai te panta kai menein ouden"All entities move and nothing remains still.
"and, second, in 402a:[11] "πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει" καὶ "δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης"Panta chōrei kai ouden menei kai dis es ton auton potamon ouk an embaies "Everything changes and nothing remains still ... and ... you cannot step twice into the same stream.
"[13]The following is an interpretation of Heraclitus's concepts in modern terms, as understood by Nicholas Rescher: "...reality is not a constellation of things at all, but one of processes.
The fundamental 'stuff' of the world is not material substance, but volatile flux, namely 'fire', and all things are versions thereof (puros tropai).
"[14]In his written works, Friedrich Nietzsche proposed what has been regarded as a philosophy of becoming that encompasses a "naturalistic doctrine intended to counter the metaphysical preoccupation with being", and a theory of "the incessant shift of perspectives and interpretations in a world that lacks a grounding essence".
[15] Søren Kierkegaard posed questions of individual becoming in Christianity which were opposed to the ancient Greek philosophers' focus on the indifferent becoming of the cosmos.
In the foundations of mathematics,[18] this project is variously understood as logicism or as part of the formalist program of David Hilbert.
Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell attempted to complete, or at least facilitate, this program with their seminal book Principia Mathematica, which purported to build a logically consistent set theory on which to found mathematics.
Alfred North Whitehead began teaching and writing on process and metaphysics when he joined Harvard University in 1924.
He was influenced by the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whom he credits along with William James and John Dewey in the preface to Process and Reality.
Whitehead thinks that discovery of previously unknown facts of nature can in principle call for reconstruction of metaphysics.
[a] For Whitehead's ontology of processes as defining the world, the actual entities exist as the only fundamental elements of reality.
The first grade comprises processes in a physical vacuum such as the propagation of an electromagnetic wave or gravitational influence across empty space.
We may say that the brain has a material and a mental aspect, all three being abstractions from their indefinitely many constitutive occasions of experience, which are actual entities.
[26] 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[27] as well as in Process and Reality.
[22] An example of a nexus of temporally overlapping occasions of experience is what Whitehead calls an enduring physical object, which corresponds closely with an Aristotelian substance.
In some contexts, especially in the theory of relativity in physics, the word 'event' refers to a single point in Minkowski or in Riemannian space-time.
For Whitehead, besides its temporal generation by the actual entities which are its contributory causes, a process may be considered as a concrescence of abstract ingredient eternal objects.
[23] Datum is a term coined by Whitehead to show the different variants of information possessed by actual entity.
Regarding Whitehead's use of the term "occasions" in reference to "God", Process and Reality: Corrected Edition explains: It also can be assumed, within some forms of theology, that a God encompasses all the other occasions of experience, yet also transcends them; it might, therefore, be argued that Whitehead endorses some form of panentheism.
Whitehead's thinking here has given rise to process theology, whose prominent advocates include Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, Jr., and Hans Jonas (with the latter being influenced by the—non-theological—philosopher Martin Heidegger as well).
[36][37] In evolution and in development, the nature of the changes of biological objects are considered by many authors to be more radical than in physical systems.
[38][39] With its perspective that everything is interconnected, that all life has value, and that non-human entities are also experiencing subjects, process philosophy has played an important role in discourse on ecology and sustainability.
The first book to connect process philosophy with environmental ethics was John B. Cobb, Jr.'s 1971 work, Is It Too Late: A Theology of Ecology.
Andrew Schwartz, Putting Philosophy to Work: Toward an Ecological Civilization[41] contributors explicitly explore the ways in which process philosophy can be put to work to address the most urgent issues facing our world today, by contributing to a transition toward an ecological civilization.
The conference brought together roughly 2,000 participants from around the world and featured such leaders in the environmental movement as Bill McKibben, Vandana Shiva, John B. Cobb, Jr., Wes Jackson, and Sheri Liao.
The process, rather than the outcomes, seemed to drive his explicit behaviour and odd use of language, 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.
Several fields of science and especially medicine seem [vague] to make liberal use of ideas in process philosophy, notably the theory of pain and healing of the late 20th century.
Like Whitehead's God, especially as elaborated in J. J. Gibson's perceptual psychology emphasizing affordances, by ordering the relevance of eternal objects (especially the cognitions of other such actors), the world becomes.
It studies processes as flows, folds, and fields in historical patterns of centripetal, centrifugal, tensional, and elastic motion.