process philosophy (redirected from Process metaphysics)

process philosophy

20th-century school of philosophy that emphasizes the elements of becoming, change, and novelty in experienced reality and opposes the traditional Western philosophical stress on being, permanence, and uniformity. Reality, including both the natural world and the human sphere, is essentially historical in this view, emerging from (and bearing) a past and advancing into a novel future. Hence, it cannot be grasped by old static spatial concepts that ignore the temporal and novel aspects of the universe given in human experience. The foremost contributors to process philosophy have been Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead.