by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: December 24, 2009   Last Updated: January 02, 2012

Process philosophy is a particular way of viewing reality. Heraclitus viewed all things as beings in a process of change. Parmenides viewed all change as something illusory. The ancient difference in points of view that either everything in a process of change or that everything is of the one absolute unchanging substance and appearance of change are contingent has continued into the 21st century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_philosophy

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy /

Since the 19th century when symbolic logic was invented (with the earlier mathematical logic of Leibnitz repressed by the inventor), its application to language analysis and in the clarification of philosophical issues outstanding involving metaphysics has created a few phenomenal issues to consider.

If the world is of substances instead of processes then the use of language may not be suitable as much for describing processes as substances or things. I enjoyed reading P.F. Strawson's 'Individuals' and the Quinian point of view on the reformation of empiricism.  Thus criticisms of Strawson's ideas about language being used primarily to refer to real objects instead of processes sets me to thin of some sort of compromise felicitous to each camp.

Referents as nouns or material objects may be the usual pattern, yet with Quine's abstraction of the relation of language to real objects we can more readily stipulate that the Strawsonian use of language would be a mere statistical occurrence. Words are associated with objects more than processes historically because of the historical preponderance of given existing real objects over intellectually defined processes. In a society that evolved from computer programmers the real objects might have been assembler language constructions built up into higher level programming languages. The real objects encountered are in real processes, yet the nouns that refer to real objects actually refer to the epiphenomena of naturally innate real processes not giving information to human language users in the same way that it does yield appearances as objects for sense data input and cognition.

Process philosophy may reflect the general trend to find the cosmological history oft he Universe as a temporally unfolding process. In Genesis God did not just create a finished project universe by processed it an era at a time before he rested and let it proceed according to plan or thermodynamic, inertial pre-destination. Process philosophers

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