Biology In
plant morphology,
Rolf Sattler developed a process morphology (dynamic morphology) that overcomes the structure/process (or structure/function) dualism that is commonly taken for granted in biology. According to process morphology, structures such as leaves of plants do not have processes, they
are processes. 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. In biology, changes are not just changes of state in a pre-given space, instead the space and more generally the mathematical structures required to understand object change over time.
Ecology 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. In a more recent book (2018) edited by
John B. Cobb, Jr. and Wm. Andrew Schwartz,
Putting Philosophy to Work: Toward an Ecological Civilization 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. That book emerged from the largest international conference held on the theme of
ecological civilization (
Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization) which was organized by the Center for Process Studies in June 2015. 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 notion of
ecological civilization is often affiliated with the process philosophy of
Alfred North Whitehead—especially in China.
Mathematics In the
philosophy of mathematics, some of Whitehead's ideas re-emerged in combination with
cognitivism as the
cognitive science of mathematics and
embodied mind theses. Somewhat earlier, exploration of
mathematical practice and
quasi-empiricism in mathematics from the 1950s to 1980s had sought alternatives to
metamathematics in social behaviours around
mathematics itself: for instance,
Paul Erdős's simultaneous belief in
Platonism and a single "big book" in which all proofs existed, combined with his personal obsessive need or decision to collaborate with the widest possible number of other mathematicians. 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. Certainly, Erdős behaved as if nothing else in the world mattered, including money or love, as emphasized in his biography
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers.
Medicine Several fields of science and especially
medicine seem to make liberal use of ideas in process philosophy, notably the theory of
pain and
healing of the late 20th century. The
philosophy of medicine began to deviate somewhat from
scientific method and an emphasis on repeatable results in the very late 20th century by embracing
population thinking, and a more pragmatic approach to issues in
public health,
environmental health, and especially
mental health. In this latter field,
R. D. Laing,
Thomas Szasz, and
Michel Foucault were instrumental in moving medicine away from emphasis on "cures" and towards concepts of individuals in balance with their society, both of which are changing, and against which no benchmarks or finished "cures" were very likely to be measurable.
Psychology In
psychology, the subject of imagination was again explored more extensively since Whitehead, and the question of feasibility or "eternal objects" of thought became central to the impaired
theory of mind explorations that framed postmodern
cognitive science. A biological understanding of the most eternal object, that being the emerging of similar but independent cognitive apparatus, led to an obsession with the process "embodiment", that being, the emergence of these
cognitions. 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. Or, it becomes simple enough for human beings to begin to make choices, and to prehend what happens as a result. These experiences may be summed in some sense but can only approximately be shared, even among very similar cognitions with identical DNA. An early explorer of this view was
Alan Turing who sought to prove the limits of expressive complexity of human genes in the late 1940s, to put bounds on the complexity of human
intelligence and so assess the feasibility of
artificial intelligence emerging. Since 2000, Process Psychology has progressed as an independent academic and therapeutic discipline: In 2000,
Michel Weber created the Whitehead Psychology Nexus: an open forum dedicated to the cross-examination of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy and the various facets of the contemporary psychological field.
Philosophy of movement The
philosophy of movement is a sub-area within process philosophy that treats processes as
movements. It studies processes as flows, folds, and fields in historical patterns of centripetal, centrifugal, tensional, and elastic motion. See
Thomas Nail's philosophy of movement and process materialism. == See also ==