Process philosophy holds that reality is fundamentally constituted by processes of becoming rather than by static substances that persist through change. Where substance metaphysics treats the world as composed of things that have properties and enter into relations, process philosophy treats the world as composed of events, experiences, and relations from which things emerge as temporary stabilities.
The tradition’s modern formulation begins with Alfred North Whitehead, whose Process and Reality (1929) developed a systematic metaphysics in which the fundamental units of reality are actual occasions — momentary events of experience that constitute themselves through prehension (the grasping of other occasions) and concrescence (the process of becoming determinate). Whitehead’s system is the most developed Western philosophical framework in which relations are ontologically prior to relata — the position that relational ontology names and that the relationality research program formalizes mathematically.
Process philosophy connects to multiple strands of this research: to perspectivism and the ontological turn through its refusal of the substance/property model; to Indigenous ontologies through its insistence that experience and relation are more fundamental than matter and form; and to the semiotic formalism through its treatment of meaning as processual — arising through the movement of interpretation rather than inhering in fixed signs.