Center for Process Studies Blog

Interested in contributing a piece to the blog? Learn more & submit here.

What Can Aristotle and Whitehead Teach a Chemist About Chemical Change?

In this blog post, I analyze the chemical transformation of molecules from two metaphysical perspectives: substance metaphysics of the sort advanced by Aristotle and later by medieval Scholastic philosophers, such as Thomas Aquinas, and process metaphysics, especially that of Alfred North Whitehead. At the end of the day, we will see commonalities between these two systems, and ask if they can be reconciled despite the rift that seems to exist between process and substance philosophy.

November 29, 2024
Ross L. Stein

Whitehead’s Metaphysics as a Cosmological Framework for Transpersonal Psychology

The philosophy of organism of Alfred North Whitehead provides an effective metaphysical framework for transpersonal psychology because of his integration of subjective, objective, and transpersonal experience within one integrated cosmos, his argument that existence is made up of dynamic events that are both mental and physical, his unification of body and mind, his refusal to bifurcate subject and object within a relational reality, his validation of nonsensory perception as the basis for internal relations, and his description of a participatory cosmos of creativity and freedom where novelty, value, purpose, and transformation are universally available realities.

September 6, 2024
Sheri D. Kling

Whiteheadian Suggestions for Process Theology

Although process theology has always been a diverse phenomenon, its historical prevalence as a movement within Protestant Christianity surely extends from Whitehead’s own concern for “the tale of the Christian religion” as beholden to “the leaders of the protestant clergy.” As evidenced in a chapter titled “The New Reformation” in Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead offered key suggestions to as to how theology might continue to evolve in light of the tangled cosmological and metaphysical vision he had developed. Far from being an “attempted Christian hijack,” Christian process theology can be seen as a thoroughly natural response to Whitehead’s suggestions.

July 24, 2024
Andrew M. Davis

Christian Process Theology and Metamodernism

I think I may be a metamodern Christian. At least I feel that way when I hear Brendan Graham Dempsey talk about metamodern Christianity. Or at least his version of it, to be developed further in a book. I am a process Christian, too. That is, I am very influenced by Christian process theology in my understanding of Christianity. But after hearing Dempsey give an overview of his vision of metamodern Christianity, it seems to me that Christian process theology is a kind of metamodern Christianity, seeking to integrate devotional, modern, and postmodern ways of thinking about God and the world into a unique and evolving whole.

April 26, 2024
Jay McDaniel

The Paradigm of Emergence: A Unifying Worldview for a Divided World and a Solution to the Meaning Crisis

The big question is, where is it all going? There’s no way to be certain, but it is useful and necessary to speculate, not to mention, fun. We can already see that as the evolutionary process proceeds on Earth, life transforms the inanimate world into an information processing network composed of a fabric that can feel. A single cell grew into a sentient web that now spans the planet, and that is just the beginning of a process of open-ended evolution and complexity growth. Through the spread of sentient beings, the universe is waking up and experiencing the fruits of its own creation.

February 20, 2024
Bobby Azarian

A New Synthesis in Process and Mimetic Theory

We’re all in the process of making sense of our reality. Finding ourselves in an environment already filled with symbols, meanings, and stories, we naturally join in this meaning-making activity. We have moments of clarity on this journey in which the complex narratives that flood our world make sense. Contrasts find harmony, chaos finds a pattern, fragments find their place in the whole, scattered symbols find their sequence within a larger story, and we see our part in this unfolding beauty.

January 19, 2024
Andre Rabe

Islam and Process Thought: Some Challenges and Possibilities

The relationship between Islam and process philosophy/thought as a philosophical system of thought, can be mutually enriched by a two-fold attitude: (1) to accept and work to highlight the commonalities while also (2) honouring the distinctiveness of each tradition and system of thought. That is, inasmuch as Islam offers a set of ideas that are universally valid, we would expect for them to surface in non-Islamic contexts, and welcome the way in which they can enrich an Islamic understanding of Islam.

December 19, 2023
Farhan Shah

Emptiness, Creativity & Feminist Ecology: An Introduction to Process Buddhism

The synthesis of Process and Buddhism, while being coherent and consistent, is necessarily incomplete (because it is an actual part of the very creative advance it refers to) and open-ended (because it is not an exception to its own rule/law/dharma that all things are open/empty), therefore it could never stand in for reality itself, but merely functions as a means of facilitating optimal, authentic, direct engagement with it. This synthesis can not only function as a potential ally to, but can be an actual agent of, ecofeminist revolution in order to aid in the realization of our planetary homecoming as an Earth Community.

November 27, 2023
Kazi Adi Shakti

Whitehead the Pragmatist and Marxism as Pragmatism: Deriving Praxis from Philosophies of Living Experience

The Marxist message to Whiteheadians is that the dialectical materialism of Marxism does not preclude the power of ideas, nor do Marxists necessarily deny individual agency. Marxists and Whiteheadians surely agree that a significant impediment to change is the entrenched notion of separateness we have in the West, but Marxists understand this ideological problem is in a dialectic with the material reality of living in the imperial core of global capitalism.

November 27, 2023
Corinne Hummel

Backyards as Forests for Food and Beauty: An Urbanite Manifesto for Earth Day 2023, Inspired by the Work of A. N. Whitehead

This manifesto encourages urbanites to transform their backyards into a forest for food and beauty for the coming years and their predicted climate-related issues. Like Whitehead’s forthcoming speculative ideal, the new vision must first be formulated. Something tangible is then able to come into existence based upon this new ideal.

November 27, 2023
Sung Sohn