Process-Philosophy on emsenn.net

Morphogenesis

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Morphogenesis — the generation of form — is one of the central problems in biology and one of its most direct connections to relational thinking. How does a fertilized egg, a single cell, become a structured organism with differentiated tissues, organs, and body plans? The standard molecular account attributes form to genetic programs: DNA encodes instructions, and development executes them. But this account faces a persistent difficulty. The genome specifies proteins, not shapes. The gap between molecular components and macroscopic form requires an account of how relational organization emerges from local interactions.

Actual Occasions and Prehension

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Audience: readers who have completed the process thinking lesson.

Learning goal: explain what actual occasions are and how prehension works as the basic relational act.

If reality is fundamentally processual, what are the basic units of process? Whitehead’s answer is the actual occasion: a momentary event of experience that constitutes itself through its relations to prior occasions and then perishes, contributing its achieved character to what comes after.

An actual occasion is not a substance — not a simple, self-identical thing that persists through time. It happens once and is done. Its identity is not given in advance but achieved through the process of becoming. What an occasion is depends entirely on what it prehends — what it grasps from the occasions in its past — and how it integrates those prehensions. An occasion apart from its prehensions is nothing; the prehensions are constitutive.

Concrescence and Creativity

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Audience: readers who have completed the actual occasions and prehension lesson.

Learning goal: explain how concrescence produces determinate occasions and how creativity names the universe’s ongoing novelty.

An actual occasion begins as an open potentiality — defined by its initial data (the prehended past) and its subjective aim (a lure toward a particular form of integration) — and concludes by achieving a definite, novel unity: its satisfaction. The internal process of moving from potentiality to definiteness is concrescence (from the Latin concrescere, to grow together).

Process and Relational Ontology

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Audience: readers who have completed the societies and endurance lesson.

Learning goal: connect process philosophy to relational ontology and to the broader concerns of this research program.

The preceding lessons have built up Whitehead’s system from its elements: actual occasions as the basic units, prehension as the basic relational act, concrescence as the process of self-constitution, creativity as the principle of novelty, and societies as the explanation of endurance. The common thread is that relations are constitutive: an occasion is what its prehensions make it, a society is what its pattern of inheritance makes it, and apart from these relations, neither is anything.

Societies and Endurance

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Audience: readers who have completed the concrescence and creativity lesson.

Learning goal: explain how process philosophy accounts for enduring objects through the concept of society.

If the fundamental units of reality are momentary actual occasions that happen once and perish, how do we account for the enduring objects of everyday experience — the chair that remains a chair, the person who persists through decades, the electron that traces a path through a cloud chamber?

Process Thinking

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Audience: readers new to process philosophy.

Learning goal: explain the basic shift from substance thinking to process thinking and why it matters for relational ontology.

Process philosophy begins with a reversal: becoming is more fundamental than being. Where substance metaphysics treats the world as composed of things that persist through change, process philosophy treats the world as composed of happenings from which things emerge as temporary stabilities. A river is not a thing that flows but a flowing that we identify as a river. An organism is not a substance that metabolizes but a metabolizing that we identify as an organism.