American Philosophy

Process Philosophy

What did Alfred North Whitehead think the world was composed of in reality?

According to Whitehead, the most primitive real unit is an actual occasion, which is not any thing or substance that persists in time, but a process, a process of becoming. This process of becoming is related to every other process of becoming, or as Whitehead’s commentators have explained, the basic unit of reality is a Leibnizian monad that has windows on every conceivable “surface.” The entire world is organic and “nature is a structure of evolving processes.” Reality is process. Moreover, Whitehead believed that his ontology, unlike the scientific ontology of inert objects, allowed for the existence of an evolving God.