School #18
Process Philosophy
Whitehead, Bergson
Process Philosophy holds that reality is fundamentally constituted by dynamic processes of becoming rather than static substances or fixed things. Henri Bergson's 'Time and Free Will' (1889) and 'Creative Evolution' (1907) argued that lived duration (duree) is the primary reality — a continuous, indivisible flow of creative becoming that the intellect falsifies by spatializing it into discrete, measurable instants. Alfred North Whitehead's 'Process and Reality' (1929) built this intuition into a comprehensive metaphysical system: the ultimate units of reality are "actual occasions" — momentary events of experience that arise, achieve subjective satisfaction, and then perish, becoming data for the next generation of occasions. There are no enduring substances, only patterns of process; even God is not an exception but the primordial instance of creative becoming, luring the world toward novel forms of order and beauty. This entry covers the philosophical (speculative-metaphysical) tradition; its explicitly Christian-theological development appears in the framework as a separate school, Process Theology (Hartshorne, Cobb, Suchocki, Griffin), which adds a personal dipolar God grounded in Christian revelation and is classified Personal metaphysical agency. Process Philosophy here treats Whitehead's primordial divinity as a cosmic-ordering principle rather than a personal God, and reads the system primarily as a speculative metaphysics of becoming rather than as a theological commitment.
Worldview
The process philosopher lives in a universe of perpetual becoming — nothing is fixed, nothing endures as a static substance, and every apparently stable thing is actually a pattern of ongoing events inheriting from one another in a creative advance. Reality is not a collection of things but a flow of happenings, each of which synthesizes the past and introduces something genuinely novel. This produces a distinctive experience of the world as alive, creative, and open-ended: the universe is not winding down toward heat death but continuously generating new forms of order and beauty. Whitehead's God is not a supernatural intervener but the principle of novelty itself, luring the world toward unrealized possibilities. The framework classifies this as Cosmic-ordering metaphysical agency: process thought (especially Whitehead's) treats God's primordial and consequent natures as the ordering principle of the creative advance, more an impersonal lure toward novelty than a case-by-case personal intervener. The framework reads this as Reason-grounded moral authority: in Whitehead's and Hartshorne's philosophical (as opposed to theological) line, the eternal objects and the rational structure of becoming function as an impersonal order from which right conduct is read.
Moral Implications
Process ethics values creativity, novelty, and the enrichment of experience as the highest goods. Since every actual occasion has a subjective pole — a moment of experience — the process philosopher extends moral consideration to all entities capable of experience, however rudimentary. The creative advance of the universe is the overarching moral framework: actions that promote richer, more harmonious, and more complex experiences are good; actions that impoverish or destroy experiential possibilities are bad. This produces an ethic that is simultaneously aesthetic and moral, since beauty — the harmony of contrasts — is the ideal toward which the universe moves. Responsibility is directed toward the future: each present moment shapes what the next generation of occasions can become.
Practical Implications
Process philosophy has influenced ecology, education, theology, and organizational theory through its emphasis on dynamic interconnection and creative emergence. In ecology, it supports a vision of nature as a community of interrelated processes rather than a stockpile of resources. In education, it favors experiential learning, creativity, and the cultivation of wonder over rote memorization and standardized testing. In organizational management, process thinking encourages adaptive, learning organizations that evolve in response to changing conditions rather than rigid hierarchies that resist change. In technology, process philosophy supports the development of systems that enhance human creativity and relational richness rather than those that merely optimize efficiency.
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I. Time
Time is emergent from the creative advance of reality — it is the medium of becoming, not a fixed container. Each "actual occasion" (Whitehead) is a novel event that synthesizes the past and perishes into objectivity for future occasions. Time is continuous, linear, and uni-directional because becoming is irreversible. Its extent is infinite because the creative advance never ceases.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Relational
Grain: Continuous
Freedom: Deterministic
Traversability: Cyclical
Dimensionality: One
Direction: Uni-directional
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II. Space
Space is emergent from the relational structure of actual occasions — it is the pattern of extensive connection among events rather than an independent container. It is flat, local, and three-dimensional in its macro-level structure. Space exists because entities are related to one another in an extensive continuum.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Relational
Curvature: Flat
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
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III. Matter
Matter is emergent — it is a high-level abstraction from the ongoing process of events. There are no enduring material substances, only sequences of momentary occasions inheriting from one another. Matter is conserved at the macro level because patterns of inheritance are stable, but at the fundamental level everything is process and becoming.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Relational
Conservation: Conserved
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
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IV. Observer
The observer is itself a process — not a fixed substance that endures through time but an ongoing event, a series of occasions of experience that extend across multiple temporal moments. At any given moment the observer is situated in a specific unfolding context, but it is always becoming, never static. Knowledge is processual and never complete; it is always in the making, always provisional. Yet each new experience integrates and builds on what came before, so the observer accumulates a growing, living record — a creative synthesis of its entire past. The observer is embodied and active, participating in the creative advance of the universe. Multiple observers are multiple processes, each contributing a unique thread to the ongoing weave of reality.
Attributes
Time Instance: Single
Space Instance: Single
Extent of Knowledge: Immediate
Retainment of Knowledge: Total
Physicality: Embodied
Agency: Active
Number: Plural
Metaphysical Agency: Cosmic-ordering
Moral Authority: Reason
Theological Method: Process-relational
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V. Energy
Energy is emergent from the creative process — it is the dynamical aspect of actual occasions rather than an independent substance. Conservation holds as a macro-level regularity of the process. Dispersibility is irreversible because each occasion of experience is a novel, unrepeatable creative act.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Conservation: Conserved
Dispersibility: Reversible
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VI. Information
Information arises in events and perishes with them — each occasion of experience creates new informational content through its synthesis of the past. It is non-conserved because each occasion is a novel creation. The framework distinguishes scales: at the cosmic scale information is non-conserved because each actual occasion perishes into objective immortality (its subjective immediacy is lost), but at the personal-identity scale information is conserved — the pattern of personal experience is preserved in the consequent nature of God and in the ongoing creative advance.
Attributes
Ontological Status: Relational
Cosmic Conservation: Conserved
Personal Conservation: Non-conserved
Granularity: Continuous
Experiments This School Responds To (20)
The Ship of Theseus
The puzzle assumes substance metaphysics that processes do not need. "The ship" is a pattern of becoming; asking which of A or B "is" the …
Parfit's Teletransporter
Persons are processes, not enduring substances. Fission cases reveal the artificiality of insisting on a unique continuant; the two-branch outcome is metaphysically tractable, just not …
Joule's Mechanical Equivalent of Heat
Whitehead's process metaphysics is congenial: energy as a fungible quantity that flows between forms is closer to reality than substantival matter or substantival caloric.
Faraday's Electromagnetic Induction
A vindication of process over substance: the field is a pattern of change, not a thing; the induced current arises from temporal variation, not from …
Hertz's Electromagnetic Waves
A wave is a pattern of change, not a thing; the experiment exemplifies the priority of process over substance in modern physics.
Pasteur's Swan-Neck Flask
Life is a process continuous with prior life; discrete moments of "creation" from inert matter are not how biology works. The experiment confirms a process …
Mendel's Pea Plants
Inheritance is a process of transmission, not a static transfer of "essences." Mendel's discreteness is real but is best read as the discreteness of a …
Dennett's 'Where Am I?'
The self is a process, not a substance with a location; the puzzle dissolves once one drops the framing of selfhood as residence in a …
The Hershey–Chase Experiment
DNA is real but is not the whole story: gene expression, regulation, and epigenetic inheritance are processual phenomena that pure DNA-centrism overlooks.
The Meselson–Stahl Experiment
Replication is a continuous templating process, not a discrete duplication. Meselson–Stahl vindicates a process reading over a substantial-copy reading of inheritance.
Bose–Einstein Condensation
A condensate is a coherent collective process rather than a substantival object; the phase transition is a paradigm of holistic emergent organisation.
The Avery–MacLeod–McCarty Experiment
Transformation is a biological process; DNA functions as part of that process, not as an isolated essence. The case identifies the specific physical substrate of …
Tycho's Supernova
The heavens are processual, not substantival-static. The new star vindicates a process metaphysics of the cosmos.
Ørsted's Compass Deflection
Field-theoretic physics begins here: electromagnetic phenomena are best understood as processes in spatially extended fields rather than as static configurations of substantial particles.
Seafloor Spreading
The Earth is a dynamic process system, not a static configuration; plate tectonics exemplifies process metaphysics in geology.
Volta's Pile
The pile exemplifies a process metaphysics: continuous transformation of chemical to electrical energy, the persistence of the device defined by the persistence of the process.
Searle's Wisdom Tooth
A process metaphysics finds Searle's position natural: consciousness is a process, irreducible to substrate, fully natural.
Galvani's Twitching Frogs
Biological processes are processes — including electrical ones. The frog-leg experiment is an early empirical anchor for the process view of life.
High-Tc Superconductivity
A clean illustration of emergent collective phenomena: bulk superconductivity arises from a process of electronic organisation that resists reduction to microscopic component states.
Hero's Aeolipile
The aeolipile is a process: fire → steam → spin. Substance metaphysics cannot capture the continuous transformation that constitutes the device's operation.
Films Reading Through This School (7)
The Fountain
The Tree of Life is treated as process rather than thing: the tree-from-Izzi that grows in the bubble is the persistence of a pattern through …
Arrival
Whiteheadian: experience is the prehension of actual occasions in concrescence; the boundary between remembered and anticipated occasions can be more porous than ordinary consciousness allows.
2001: A Space Odyssey
A process-metaphysical structure: from inorganic matter through organic life through intelligence through machine intelligence to whatever the Star Child is. The film treats this as …
Annihilation
The Shimmer is process-philosophical in mechanism: actual occasions inherit and modify one another, and the resulting entities are neither original nor derivative but continuations of …
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Selves and relationships as processes, not substances. The relationship is shown to be something they keep co-constructing; erasure interrupts the process without destroying the capacities …
Mr. Nobody
A Whiteheadian reading: each adult Nemo is an actual occasion of experience prehending its past; the film does not assert which is real because all …
Solaris
Identity as ongoing process: the visitor-Hari — who has no memory before her arrival, who awakens new each "morning" — slowly accumulates into a person.
Debates Where This School Is Allied (20)
Sartre–Heidegger on Humanism
Thinker of Being
Carnap vs Heidegger on Metaphysics
Existential phenomenologist; thinker of Being
Husserl and Heidegger
Existential / fundamental ontologist
Habermas–Gadamer on Hermeneutics and Critique
Philosophical hermeneuticist
Hegel and Schopenhauer
Absolute idealist; theorist of Spirit
Hegel and Schopenhauer
Pessimistic metaphysician; theorist of Will
Nietzsche vs Wagner
Composer; theorist of total artwork
The Heidegger–Cassirer Davos Disputation
Existential phenomenologist
Russell vs Bergson on Time
Vitalist philosopher of duration
Searle vs Derrida on Speech Acts
Deconstructionist
Bergson vs Einstein on Time
Philosopher of duration
Kierkegaard vs Hegel
Absolute idealist; theorist of Spirit
Heidegger vs Levinas
Thinker of Being; fundamental ontology
Heidegger vs Levinas
Ethical phenomenologist; theorist of alterity
Heraclitus vs Parmenides
Philosopher of becoming and the Logos
Aristotle vs Democritus on Atoms
Hylomorphic philosopher of nature
Sartre and Beauvoir
Situated existentialist; ethical-political philosopher; feminist
Epicurus vs the Stoics
Cosmopolitan virtue ethicists; providential physicists
Plotinus vs the Gnostics
Founder of Neoplatonism
Adorno vs Benjamin
Marxist-mystic cultural theorist
Works that name Process Philosophy in their embodiments
Foundational texts that draw on this school, with each work's declared weight.
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Process and Reality (Late)
Alfred North Whitehead · 1929 (delivered as Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh, 1927–28)
Fragments
Heraclitus of Ephesus · c. 500 BC
Metamorphoses
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) · c. 8 CE
Adventures of Ideas (Late (Whitehead's last major book))
Alfred North Whitehead · 1933
The Concept of Nature (Early-mid (preceding Science and the Modern World, 1925))
Alfred North Whitehead · 1920 (the Tarner Lectures, Trinity College Cambridge)
Modes of Thought (Late)
Alfred North Whitehead · 1938 (Wellesley & University of Chicago lectures, 1937-38)
Creative Evolution (L'évolution créatrice) (Late)
Henri Bergson · 1907
Science and the Modern World (Mid (the major statement of philosophical-cultural critique, preceding the technical metaphysics of Process and Reality))
Alfred North Whitehead · 1925 (the Lowell Lectures, Harvard; the proximate prelude to Process and Reality, 1929)
On Nature (Fragments)
Heraclitus of Ephesus · c. 500 BC (the fragments preserved through later authors' quotations)
Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Late)
Charles Hartshorne · 1984
Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience) (Early)
Henri Bergson · 1889 (doctoral thesis)
Matter and Memory (Matière et Mémoire) (Mid)
Henri Bergson · 1896
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Late (Bergson's last major book, written after a long convalescence))
Henri Bergson · 1932 (Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, Paris: Alcan; English trans. R. Ashley Audra & Cloudesley Brereton 1935)
Duration and Simultaneity (Mature (the disastrous engagement with Einstein that damaged Bergson's standing among physicists))
Henri Bergson · 1922 (Durée et Simultanéité: à propos de la théorie d'Einstein, Paris: Alcan; revised 2nd edn 1923)
Laughter (Early-mature (between Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution))
Henri Bergson · 1900 (Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique, Revue de Paris; book edition 1900; revised many times through 1924)
The Metaphysics of Modern Existence (Mature (Deloria's most ambitious philosophical work))
Vine Deloria Jr. · 1979 (Harper & Row)
Mind-Energy (Middle)
Henri Bergson · 1900s-1913 essays; collected 1919
Christ in a Pluralistic Age (Mid)
John B. Cobb Jr. · 1975
Difference and Repetition (Différence et Répétition) (Mid)
Gilles Deleuze · 1968
Cosmopolitics (Late)
Isabelle Stengers · 2003-11 (French in 7 vols; English in 2 vols)
Pure Lust (Late-mature)
Mary Daly · 1984 (Beacon Press)
A Pluralistic Universe (Late)
William James · 1909 (Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, May 1908)
Faust II (Last)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1825-31 (completed shortly before Goethe's 1832 death; published posthumously 1832)
The Mind and its Place in Nature (Mid)
C. D. Broad · 1923 (lectures), 1925 (book)
I Ching (Book of Changes, attributed arrangement)
King Wen of Zhou (traditional attribution) · c. 1050–800 BCE (core hexagram and judgment layers; commentaries later)
The Human Cycle (Middle)
Sri Aurobindo · 1916-18 (Arya serial); 1949 book
On Dialogue (Late (posthumous))
David Bohm · Lectures 1980s-90s; book 1996 (posthumous, ed. Lee Nichol)
The Dhammapada
Anonymous (attributed to the Buddha, compiled by the early sangha) · c. 3rd century BC (Pali recension; verses likely older)
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Mature (the most comprehensive single-text statement of the system))
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1817 (1st edition); 1827 (2nd edition); 1830 (3rd and definitive edition, in three volumes)
To the Lighthouse (Mid (Woolf at the height of her powers))
Virginia Woolf · 1927
Tradition and the Individual Talent (Early (Eliot's major early critical statement))
Thomas Stearns Eliot · 1919 (first published in The Egoist, September-December 1919)
The Life Divine (Late)
Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghose) · 1914-19 (Arya magazine); 1939-40 (book)
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2 (Late)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari · 1980
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Late)
Muhammad Iqbal · 1930-34
The Waves (Mature)
Virginia Woolf · 1931 (Hogarth Press)
The Book of Changes (Yi Jing) (Early)
Anonymous (traditionally Fu Xi for hexagrams; King Wen and Duke of Zhou for line-statements; Confucius for the Ten Wings commentaries) · Hexagrams: legendary, pre-1000 BCE; line-statements: c. 1000-750 BCE; Ten Wings commentaries: c. 500-100 BCE
Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Late)
David Bohm · 1980
Der Ring des Nibelungen (Middle-to-late (career-spanning))
Richard Wagner · 1848–1874 (poem 1848–52; music 1853–74; complete premiere Bayreuth 1876)
The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis (Late)
Alan Turing · 1952
On the Will in Nature (Middle)
Arthur Schopenhauer · 1836 (2nd ed. 1854)
Kitāb al-Mashāʿir (Mature)
Mulla Sadra (Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi) · c. 17th century (mid-career)
Christianismi Restitutio (Late (final))
Michael Servetus · 1553
From the Acting to the Seeing (Middle-to-late)
Nishida Kitarō · 1927
The Self-Identity of Absolute Contradiction (Late)
Nishida Kitarō · 1939
Tao Te Ching
Attributed to Laozi (Lao Tzu); likely composite, possibly c. 4th–3rd century BC · c. 4th century BC (received text); Guodian bamboo slips c. 300 BC
Zhuangzi — Inner Chapters
Zhuang Zhou (with later editorial layers; Inner Chapters most likely by his hand) · c. late 4th century BC
Phenomenology of Spirit (Early)
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1806–07 (finished as Napoleon entered Jena)
On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin · 1859 (first edition); five subsequent revised editions in Darwin's lifetime
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1883 (parts I, II); 1884 (III); 1885 (IV, private printing)
Being and Time (Early)
Martin Heidegger · 1927 (Jahrbuch für Philosophie publication; only Divisions I and II of the planned three completed)
Letter on Humanism (Late)
Martin Heidegger · 1946 (drafted as a letter to Jean Beaufret); 1947 (published)
Monadology (Late)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz · 1714 (written in French for Prince Eugene of Savoy); published 1720 in German
I Ching
Anonymous / composite (traditional attribution to King Wen and Confucius; the Ten Wings to the Confucian school) · c. 9th–8th c. BC (core hexagrams); c. 4th c. BC (Ten Wings); standard form c. 200 BC
System of Transcendental Idealism (Early)
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling · 1800
Experience and Nature (Late)
John Dewey · 1925 (Carus Lectures, Chicago; revised 1929)
Phenomenology of Perception
Maurice Merleau-Ponty · 1945
The Birth of Tragedy (Early)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1872 (with "Attempt at a Self-Criticism" preface added 1886)
Gettysburg Address (Mature (Civil War))
Abraham Lincoln · November 19, 1863 (delivered 4½ months after the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863)
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Late (the mature systematic philosophy))
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1820 (published 1821 with the famous controversial Preface)
Science of Logic (Mid (the central work of the mature Hegelian system))
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1812 (Book I, Being); 1813 (Book II, Essence); 1816 (Book III, Concept); 1832 (Hegel's revised Book I, posthumous)
The Principles of Psychology (Mid (the major early work; foundational for both psychology and pragmatist philosophy))
William James · 1890 (after twelve years of writing; James later said he should not have spent so much time on it)
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Late (Berlin lectures of the 1820s, his mature mature))
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1822-31 (delivered as lectures); 1837 (compiled and published posthumously by Eduard Gans)
Lectures on Aesthetics (Late (Berlin lectures))
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1820s (delivered as lectures); 1835-38 (compiled and published posthumously by H. G. Hotho)
Liber Divinorum Operum (Late (the culmination of her visionary trilogy))
Hildegard of Bingen · 1163-73 (composed in the last decade of Hildegard's life, after the Scivias and the Liber Vitae Meritorum)
Repetition (Early-mid (the same explosive 1843 as Either/Or and Fear and Trembling))
Søren Kierkegaard · 1843 (published the same day as Fear and Trembling, under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius)
Discourse on Metaphysics (Mid (Leibniz's breakthrough philosophical statement))
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz · 1686 (sent to Antoine Arnauld; not published in Leibniz's lifetime)
Mrs Dalloway (Mid (the first major modernist novel of Woolf's maturity))
Virginia Woolf · 1925
Four Quartets (Late (Eliot's mature Anglo-Catholic period))
Thomas Stearns Eliot · 1936 (Burnt Norton); 1940 (East Coker); 1941 (The Dry Salvages); 1942 (Little Gidding); 1943 (collected publication)
Faust, Part I (Mid (composed across Goethe's career; Part I the major mid-career work))
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1772-1808 (composed across decades; Part I published 1808; Part II completed 1832, posthumous)
It from Bit / Information, Physics, Quantum (Late)
John Archibald Wheeler · 1989-90 (the "It from Bit" thesis articulated in conference papers and essays)
Staying with the Trouble (Late)
Donna Haraway · 2016
The Sea of Fertility (Late (the major late work, completed the day of his 1970 ritual suicide))
Yukio Mishima · 1965-70 (Spring Snow 1965-67, Runaway Horses 1967-68, The Temple of Dawn 1968-70, The Decay of the Angel 1970-71)
Myth, Literature and the African World (Mid)
Wole Soyinka · 1976
Art as Experience (Late)
John Dewey · 1934 (William James Lectures at Harvard, 1931)
Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (Late (Næss's mature statement; the systematic expansion of his 1973 "shallow vs deep ecology" essay))
Arne Næss · 1976 (Norwegian); 1989 (English)
The Visible and the Invisible (Late)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty · 1964 (posthumous; composed 1959-61)
The Essence of Manifestation (Early)
Michel Henry · 1963 (French; English 1973)
Shōbōgenzō (Late)
Dōgen Zenji · 1231-1253 (95 fascicles)
al-Ḥikma al-Mutaʿāliya fī l-Asfār al-ʿAqliyya al-Arbaʿa (Transcendent Wisdom in the Four Intellectual Journeys) (Late)
Mullā Ṣadrā (Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī) · c. 1628
On Nature and Purifications (Fragments) (Early)
Empedocles of Acragas · c. 450 BCE
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 1 (Late)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari · 1972
An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no Kenkyū) (Early)
Nishida Kitarō · 1911
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Late)
James Lovelock · 1979
Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (Dongxi wenhua ji qi zhexue) (Early)
Liang Shuming · 1921
Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Late)
Tu Weiming · 1985
Black Elk Speaks (Late)
Nicholas Black Elk (Heȟáka Sápa), recorded by John G. Neihardt · 1932
Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann) (Mid)
Marcel Proust · 1913
The Red Book (Middle (the personal experimental record from which all of Jung's later theoretical work emerged))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1914-30 (composed in calligraphic script with painted illuminations; published 2009 by W. W. Norton, ed. Sonu Shamdasani)
Physica and Causae et Curae (Mid-mature (Hildegard's middle period, between her three major visionary works))
Hildegard of Bingen · c. 1150-58 (Rupertsberg, between Scivias and Liber Vitae Meritorum)
Ocean of Reasoning (Mature (Tsongkhapa's major philosophical-Madhyamaka work))
Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa · c. 1407
Al-Hikmat al-Muta'aliya fi'l-Asfar al-'Aqliyya al-Arba'a (Late (the synthesis of his entire mature philosophy))
Mulla Sadra (Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi) · composed over Mulla Sadra's mature life, completed c. 1638
Between the Acts (Last)
Virginia Woolf · 1940-41 (Hogarth, posthumous July 1941; Woolf died March 28, 1941)
Essays in Radical Empiricism (Late posthumous)
William James · 1904-08 essays; collected posthumously 1912
Parable of the Sower (Mature)
Octavia E. Butler · 1993
Parable of the Talents (Late-mature)
Octavia E. Butler · 1998 (Nebula 1999)
The Immeasurable Equation (Posthumous)
Sun Ra (Herman Poole Blount) · 1950s-1993; collected 2005
Faust I (Mature)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1772-1806 (composed over 35 years; published 1808)
The Meaning of the Creative Act (Early-mature)
Nikolai Berdyaev · 1916 (Smysl tvorchestva)
When Species Meet (Late)
Donna Haraway · 2008
An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Late)
Bruno Latour · 2013 (French), 2013 (English)
Causality and Chance in Modern Physics (Mid)
David Bohm · 1957
The Undivided Universe (Late)
David Bohm · 1993 (posthumous; Bohm died October 1992)
The Synthesis of Yoga (Mature)
Sri Aurobindo · 1914-21 (serial), revisions through 1940s
Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol (Late)
Sri Aurobindo · c. 1916-1950 (composed across decades; final revisions until weeks before Aurobindo's 1950 death)
Asrar-i Khudi (Secrets of the Self) (Mid)
Muhammad Iqbal · 1915
Lectures on Psychical Research (Late)
C. D. Broad · 1959-60 (lectures), 1962 (book)
Pali Canon: Sutta Pitaka (Early)
Siddhārtha Gautama (the Buddha) · c. 5th-1st c. BCE (compiled c. 1st c. BCE)
Pali Canon: Abhidhamma Pitaka (Early-Mid)
Siddhārtha Gautama (the Buddha) · c. 3rd c. BCE-1st c. BCE (compiled later than other baskets)
Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (Late)
Arne Næss · 1989
De Apice Theoriae (Late)
Nicholas of Cusa (Nicolaus Cusanus) · 1464
The Artwork of the Future (Early)
Richard Wagner · 1849
Opera and Drama (Early-to-Middle)
Richard Wagner · 1851
Plato's Dialectical Ethics (Early)
Hans-Georg Gadamer · 1931
Philosophical Hermeneutics (Late-middle)
Hans-Georg Gadamer · 1976 (essays 1957-1975)
On Nature (fragments)
Anaximander of Miletus · c. 6th century BCE
Food of the Gods
Terence McKenna · 1992
Treatise on the Golden Lion
Fazang · c. 699 CE (lecture to Empress Wu Zetian)
Tristan und Isolde (Middle (post-Schopenhauer))
Richard Wagner · 1857–1859 (premiered Munich, 1865)
Ethics
Baruch Spinoza · completed c. 1675; published posthumously 1677
Metaphysics
Aristotle (compiled posthumously by Andronicus of Rhodes c. 70 BC) · c. 350 BC (lecture notes, second Athenian period)
Capital, Volume I (Late)
Karl Marx · 1867 (German first ed.); Volume II 1885, Volume III 1894 (posthumous, ed. Engels)
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā
Nāgārjuna · c. 150–250 AD (South India)
Abhidharmakośa
Vasubandhu · c. 4th–5th century AD
The Heart Sutra
Anonymous (Mahāyāna tradition; some scholars argue for a Chinese composition c. 7th century) · c. 600 AD (extant form); verses possibly earlier
The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
Hui-neng (638–713), as transmitted by Fa-hai · c. 780 AD (Dunhuang manuscript); refined recensions through 13th century
Critique of Judgment (Late)
Immanuel Kant · 1790
Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville · Volume I 1835; Volume II 1840 (based on Tocqueville's 1831–32 American journey)
Theses on Feuerbach (Early)
Karl Marx · 1845 (notebook fragments, published posthumously by Engels in 1888 with slight editorial changes)
The Human Condition
Hannah Arendt · 1958
On the Genealogy of Morality (Late)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1887 (composed in 20 days)
Physics
Aristotle · c. 350 BC (second Athenian period)
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Early)
Karl Marx · Paris, summer 1844 (notebook manuscripts; unfinished and unpublished in Marx's lifetime); first published 1932
Beyond Good and Evil (Late)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1886
The Question Concerning Technology (Late)
Martin Heidegger · 1953 (Munich lecture); 1954 (published)
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Early-to-late (he revised it throughout his life))
Adam Smith · 1759 (1st edition); 1790 (6th and definitive edition with substantial additions)
Principia Mathematica (Early (both authors))
Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell · 1910 (vol. 1), 1912 (vol. 2), 1913 (vol. 3); 2nd edition 1925-27
Deliverance from Error (Late)
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī · c. 1108 (late in al-Ghazali's life, after returning to teaching)
On Interpretation
Aristotle · c. 350 BC (early in the Organon)
Second Inaugural Address (Late (six weeks before assassination))
Abraham Lincoln · March 4, 1865 (six weeks before his assassination)
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Mid-late (the second of the After Virtue trilogy))
Alasdair MacIntyre · 1988
Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (Mid (the transcendental turn))
Edmund Husserl · 1913
The Gay Science (Middle (between Daybreak and Zarathustra))
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1882 (first edition, four books); 1887 (second edition, with added fifth book and preface)
The History of Sexuality (Late (his last major project))
Michel Foucault · 1976 (vol. 1); 1984 (vols. 2-3, shortly before Foucault's death); vol. 4 (Confessions of the Flesh) published posthumously 2018
I and Thou (Mid (the foundational statement of dialogical philosophy))
Martin Buber · 1923
Essays: First Series (Mid (Emerson at the peak of his powers))
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841 (twelve essays collected from earlier lectures and journal entries)
The Will to Believe (Mid (between Principles of Psychology and Varieties of Religious Experience))
William James · 1897 (title essay, addressed to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown, 1896)
Dependent Rational Animals (Late (the explicit Thomist completion of the After Virtue trilogy))
Alasdair MacIntyre · 1999
The Social Contract (Late (after the two Discourses; the political conclusion of Rousseau's mature thought))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762
Émile (Late)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762 (published the same year as the Social Contract; both condemned and burned by authorities)
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Mid (between the First Discourse and the Social Contract))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1755 (submitted to the 1754 essay competition of the Académie de Dijon, on the question of the origin and justification of inequality)
Otherwise than Being (Late (the more radical successor to Totality and Infinity, 1961))
Emmanuel Levinas · 1974
Zhuangzi
Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou) · c. 4th-3rd c. BC (Inner Chapters by Zhuang Zhou; Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters by later hands)
The Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean
Confucius (Kongzi) · Originally chapters of the Book of Rites (Li Ji, c. 1st c. BC); elevated to the Four Books by Zhu Xi (1130-1200) in the Song dynasty
The Plague (Mid (between The Stranger and The Rebel))
Albert Camus · 1947
Ideas and Opinions (Late (the most comprehensive single-volume collection))
Albert Einstein · 1954 (collected from earlier essays and addresses)
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Late (third volume of the After Virtue trilogy))
Alasdair MacIntyre · 1990 (the Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh, 1988)
Strength to Love (Mid (the major collection of sermons))
Martin Luther King Jr. · 1963 (collected sermons; some preached at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church Montgomery in the 1950s)
Hind Swaraj (Early (the founding text of Gandhi's mature political-philosophical vision))
Mohandas K. Gandhi · 1909 (written aboard the Kildonan Castle in ten days during the voyage from London to South Africa)
Tales of the Hasidim (Late (Buber's mature engagement with the Hasidic tradition))
Martin Buber · 1947 (The Early Masters); 1948 (The Later Masters); compiled over decades of Buber's engagement with Hasidism
Gitanjali (Mid (the Nobel-winning collection))
Rabindranath Tagore · 1910 (Bengali original); 1912 (Tagore's own English prose translation)
Sadhana: The Realisation of Life (Mid (the major philosophical prose statement))
Rabindranath Tagore · 1913 (the Hibbert Lectures, Harvard; published 1913)
Critique of Dialectical Reason (Late (Sartre's major late philosophical work))
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1960 (vol. I); vol. II unfinished, published posthumously 1985
The Irony of American History (Late (Niebuhr's major Cold War political-theological book))
Reinhold Niebuhr · 1952
Principles of Political Economy (Mid (Mill's major economic work))
John Stuart Mill · 1848 (1st edition); revised through 1871 (7th edition)
A System of Logic (Early (Mill's first major book, the foundation of his philosophical reputation))
John Stuart Mill · 1843 (Mill's first major book); revised through 1872 (8th edition)
Time and the Other (Early (the breakthrough early work, before Totality and Infinity))
Emmanuel Levinas · 1946-47 (delivered as four lectures at Collège philosophique); published 1948
Parisian Questions (Mid-late)
Meister Eckhart (Eckhart von Hochheim) · c. 1300-1326 (the scholastic-Latin works composed across Eckhart's academic career)
New Essays on Human Understanding (Late)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz · 1704 (completed; Leibniz suppressed publication after Locke's 1704 death); 1765 (posthumous publication)
Psychological Types (Mid (the major systematic work after his 1912-13 break with Freud))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1921
Death and the King's Horseman (Mid (the major play of Soyinka's career))
Wole Soyinka · 1975
A Time for Choosing (Early (launched Reagan's political career))
Ronald W. Reagan · October 27, 1964 (broadcast nationally on behalf of Goldwater)
Tear Down This Wall (Late (Reagan presidency at its rhetorical peak))
Ronald W. Reagan · June 12, 1987 (delivered at the Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin)
First Inaugural Address (Mid (the inauguration after twelve years of Republican presidency))
William J. Clinton · January 20, 1993
Parerga and Paralipomena (Late)
Arthur Schopenhauer · 1851
Representation and Reality (Mid)
Hilary Putnam · 1988
Gravitation (Mid-late)
John Archibald Wheeler · 1973
The Lion and the Jewel (Early)
Wole Soyinka · 1959
An American Life (Late)
Ronald W. Reagan · 1990
My Life (Late)
William J. Clinton · 2004
Promises to Keep (Mid)
Joseph R. Biden Jr. · 2007
Principles of Nature and Grace (Late)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz · 1714
Anasakti Yoga: The Gita According to Gandhi (Mid-late)
Mohandas K. Gandhi · 1929-32 (translations and commentaries; collected as Anasakti Yoga 1930)
The Quest for Certainty (Late)
John Dewey · 1929 (Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, 1928-29)
The Philosophy of Loyalty (Late)
Josiah Royce · 1908
Tool-Being (Early (Harman's breakthrough work, derived from his 1999 DePaul PhD))
Graham Harman · 2002
The Prose of the World (Mid)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty · composed 1950-52; published 1969 (posthumous)
The Mystery of Being (Late)
Gabriel Marcel · 1949-50 (Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen)
Wild Ivy (Itsumadegusa) (Late)
Hakuin Ekaku · 1765-66
Attaining Enlightenment in This Very Existence (Sokushin Jōbutsu Gi) (Early)
Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi) · c. 817
Lam rim chen mo (The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment) (Mid)
Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa · 1402
De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance) (Late)
Nicholas of Cusa (Nikolaus von Kues) · 1440
The Life of Moses (De Vita Moysis) (Late)
St. Gregory of Nyssa · c. 390
Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature) (Mid)
John Scotus Eriugena · c. 867
Faust, Part Two (Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil) (Late)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1832 (composed 1825-31; published posthumously)
Philosophy as Metanoetics (Zangedō to shite no tetsugaku) (Late)
Tanabe Hajime · 1946
African Religions and Philosophy (Mid)
John S. Mbiti · 1969 (2nd edn 1990)
A Sand County Almanac (Late)
Aldo Leopold · 1949 (posthumous)
The World and the Individual (Mid)
Josiah Royce · 1899-1901 (Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen)
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Late)
Shunryu Suzuki (Suzuki-rōshi) · 1970
Being Peace (Late)
Thich Nhat Hanh · 1987
God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Late)
Vine Deloria Jr. · 1973 (2nd edn 1992; 3rd edn 2003)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) (Mid)
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967
A Vision (Late)
W.B. Yeats · 1925 (1st edn); 1937 (rev. 2nd edn)
The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) (Late)
Thomas Mann · 1912-24 (composed); 1924 (published)
God in Search of Man (Late)
Abraham Joshua Heschel · 1955
Austerlitz (Late)
W.G. Sebald · 2001
The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview (Late (Nishida's final completed essay, written months before his death))
Nishida Kitarō · 1945 (composed Feb-April 1945; published posthumously)
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Early-mature)
Henry David Thoreau · 1849 (composed during Thoreau's Walden Pond years 1845-47; published 1849 at Thoreau's own expense)
Essays: First Series (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841 (James Munroe & Co., Boston)
Soliloquies (Early)
Friedrich Schleiermacher · 1800 (Monologen, Berlin)
The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (Mature)
Charles Darwin · 1868 (John Murray, London); revised 1875
Personas with Process Philosophy as a declared influence
50% Alfred North Whitehead
40% Heraclitus of Ephesus
35% Henri Bergson
30% Publius Ovidius Naso
25% Octavia E. Butler
20% David Bohm
20% Sri Aurobindo
20% Mulla Sadra (Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi)
20% Richard Wagner
15% Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
15% Martin Heidegger
15% Mary Daly
15% Donna Haraway
15% Muhammad Iqbal
15% Nāgārjuna
15% Nishida Kitarō
15% Hans-Georg Gadamer
15% Ernst Cassirer
15% Jacques Derrida
15% Empedocles of Acragas
15% Fazang
15% King Wen of Zhou
10% Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
10% J. M. E. McTaggart
10% Bruno Latour
10% Theodor Adorno
10% Anaximander of Miletus
How Process Philosophy resolves each dilemma
56 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 30 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 1 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
Distinctive · only 10% of schools agree
(20/208)
Do you really choose?
If the brain is a physical system and physical systems are governed by laws, then every choice is also a chain of causes — which raises the question of what was really left to choose.
Choice is real within a determined order — agency and determinism aren’t opposites.
On this view, the future is determined and you are genuinely choosing. Those aren't contradictory because the determination runs through you rather than around you: your reasoning, deliberation, and assent are the way the determined outcome gets settled. Choice is what it feels like from …
Roads not taken
The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it. (69%) ·
Choice is structural illusion — every event is fixed by the prior state. (10%) ·
Even if the universe is undetermined, you are not the chooser. (6%)
Distinctive · only 10% of schools agree
(20/208)
Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
Addiction looks from one angle like the textbook case of agency failing — a person doing what they don't, in any meaningful sense, want to do. From another angle it looks like agency at work in hard conditions. Which it is depends on what agency is.
The addict is genuinely responsible within a determined order.
On this view, the addict is acting within a determined order but is genuinely acting — making decisions, endorsing or resisting urges, seeking or refusing help. Responsibility attaches not because some uncaused choice happened, but because the addict is the kind of agent through which …
Roads not taken
The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real. (69%) ·
The addict's behaviour is the outcome of causes; 'responsibility' is a useful fiction, not a metaphysical fact. (10%) ·
Even if the universe is undetermined, the addict isn't the chooser. (6%)
Distinctive · only 10% of schools agree
(20/208)
Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
When an autonomous AI takes an action that harms someone, the question of who or what is responsible — the developer, the operator, the model itself — turns on whether the model is the kind of thing that can be a responsible agent.
The AI can be a genuine agent within determined conditions — and therefore genuinely responsible.
On this view, what makes a being responsible is not indeterminism but the kind of process the being is. An AI that deliberates, considers consequences, can be given reasons, and modifies its behaviour on reflection is doing what responsible agency is, even if its underlying …
Roads not taken
An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible. (69%) ·
An AI's behaviour is fully determined by training and input; 'responsibility' applies if at all to its makers. (10%) ·
Neither AIs nor anyone else are the locus of free agency; the question is the wrong one. (6%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(31/208)
Is the universe running out of usable energy?
The heat death of the universe — entropy maxed out, no further work possible — is among the more sobering implications of mainstream physics. Whether it is structurally inescapable depends on what kind of finitude the cosmos has.
Both time and matter are unbounded; 'running out' is misframed.
On this view, the cosmos has neither a temporal horizon nor a material exhaustion point. The framing of running out presupposes bounds that the cosmos doesn't have. Energy gradients perpetuate; new configurations emerge; the categories that make heat-death scary don't apply at the cosmic scale.
Roads not taken
Time is unbounded but matter is finite; usable energy can fail without time failing. (47%) ·
Time both has and lacks bounds depending on the level you ask at; finitude is conventional. (26%) ·
The cosmos has bounds; heat death is a real horizon. (12%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(31/208)
Are natural resources fundamentally finite, or only practically so?
Whether we can grow our way out of resource constraints — or whether the cosmos sets limits the economy ultimately must obey — depends on what kind of finitude matter has.
Resources are practically inexhaustible on cosmic scales; terrestrial limits are engineering.
On this view, matter and time are both unbounded at the largest scales. Terrestrial resource limits are real engineering and political constraints but not metaphysical ones; the cosmos can in principle support whatever expansion intelligence is capable of.
Roads not taken
Time goes on but matter is bounded; we are eventually constrained even with infinite time. (47%) ·
The finitude question is level-dependent; resource ethics happens at the level that constrains us. (26%) ·
Resources are finite in the strict sense; living well requires accepting the limit. (12%)
4 mainstream positions
Could we owe future generations more than is materially possible to provide?
Both time and matter are unbounded; we cannot in principle owe more than is possible.
15%
How much weight do future people deserve?
Past, present, and future are bound in cycles — duties span generations as a matter of course.
18%
Is regret rational?
The past is part of a cycle one keeps returning to; regret is one of the gates of the cycle.
18%
Do we owe extinct species something we cannot give them?
Past beings are part of the cycle; we owe them what we owe ancestors.
18%
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
What is money?
The question of what money is — a measured store of real value, an agreed-on practice, a relational ledger of debts, or just a name we apply to many different things — sits behind every argument about inflation, cryptocurrency, debt, and the state.
Money is the ledger of obligations among real people.
On relational views, money is not a substance you have; it is a record of who owes whom what. Debts and credits are real because the relations they track are real — to kin, to community, to ancestors, to land. Money is the form this …
Roads not taken
Money is a real institution with intrinsic features. (55%) ·
Money is a social practice — its content is what we make it. (16%) ·
“Money” names a family of practices — the definition question is nominal. (8%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
What is a nation?
Whether a nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character, a constructed legal-political artifact, a web of kinship and shared history, an imagined community, or a conventional partition of a deeper unity — these are real ontological positions with sharply different political downstream.
A nation is the web of kinship, ancestry, and shared land that hosts a people.
On relational views, the nation is the relational fabric — extended kinship, ancestral inheritance, shared ecology, communal practice — that hosts a people across generations. Borders matter less than belonging; lineage and land carry the weight that political structures only ratify.
Roads not taken
A nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character. (55%) ·
A nation is a constructed polity — a project, not a discovery. (16%) ·
“Nation” names a family of practices imaginatively held together. (8%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
What makes someone male or female?
Whether sex is a real biological kind, a constructed social category, a relational identity, a label applied to varied phenomena, or a conventional distinction within a deeper unity is the ontological question the contemporary dispute about gender is mostly about.
Sex and gender are constituted by relations of recognition.
On relational views, identity is not a property a person has alone; it is constituted by the web of recognition the person sits in. What makes someone a man or a woman in any thick sense is the relations of kinship, community, ritual, and recognition …
Roads not taken
Sex is a real biological kind with given content. (55%) ·
Gender is constructed; what counts as male or female reflects practice. (16%) ·
“Male” and “female” are family-resemblance terms — no single essence. (8%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
Should we edit the human germline?
Whether human nature is a given biological kind, a constructed category, a relational achievement, a family-resemblance cluster, or a conventional distinction within deeper unity is the ontological question the policy debate over heritable gene editing is mostly about.
Personhood is constituted by relations of descent and kinship; germline editing reshapes the relational fabric.
On relational views, what makes someone a person is the web of kinship, ancestry, and community they sit in — not a property the body carries alone. Heritable editing intervenes in exactly this fabric: the lineage that ancestors handed on, the descent that descendants will …
Roads not taken
Human nature is a real biological kind given by reproductive biology or by creation; editing the germline transgresses what is given. (55%) ·
The categories we count as 'human' are emergent from practice; germline editing is a practice-revision like any other. (16%) ·
'Human nature' is a cluster term without a single essence; the editing question is empirical, not metaphysical. (8%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
Is the world created from nothing?
Creatio ex nihilo is one of the most distinctive Western-theological claims. Whether matter was created from nothing, eternally exists, or is sustained moment-by-moment turns on what kind of thing matter is.
Matter is constituted by relations; the question of 'from what?' presupposes substance.
On this view, matter is not a stuff but a patterning — the standing relations among things, ancestors, processes, and places. The creatio-ex-nihilo question doesn't quite arise, because the ontology has no slot for a free-standing substance to be created or eternal. What persists is …
Roads not taken
Yes — matter was created and is conserved as a real substance. (56%) ·
Matter is real but emerges from something deeper — neither bedrock nor created-from-nothing. (23%) ·
Matter arises and dissolves through cosmic rounds; neither created from nothing nor eternal. (4%)
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.
Distinctive · only 11% of schools agree
(22/208)
Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
Different traditions take fundamentally different things to be the basic moral-political unit.
The species or biosphere is the moral primary.
The biological species, or the wider community of sentient life, is the moral unit.
Roads not taken
The discrete person is the moral primary. (38%) ·
The community of persons is the moral primary. (28%) ·
The cosmic-religious order is the moral primary. (16%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
When does a person begin?
The political question of abortion sits atop an older ontological one: at what point does there exist a someone — a being with moral standing — rather than merely the materials from which one will form?
Personhood is conferred by being-in-relation.
On relational views, person was never the name of a thing that exists on its own — it is the name of a node in a web of recognition, obligation, kinship, and ecology. The question of when a being becomes a person is the question …
Roads not taken
A person exists from conception — when a new being comes into existence. (55%) ·
A person comes into being gradually, as the capacities of a mind develop. (16%) ·
The question presupposes a fact of the matter that isn’t there. (8%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
What is marriage?
Behind every disagreement about how marriage should be defined is a prior disagreement about what kind of thing it is — a given order to be recognized, a practice to be negotiated, or a web of relations to be woven.
Marriage is constituted by the web of relations it creates.
On relational views, marriage is not a thing in itself but a node in a web — a configuration of obligations to children, extended kin, ancestors, ecology, and community. Its definition is what the network of relations is, and any attempt to specify it apart …
Roads not taken
Marriage has a given form — it’s a kind of thing we recognize, not make. (55%) ·
Marriage is a practice we shape — its content is what we make it. (16%) ·
“Marriage” names a family of practices — the definition question is nominal. (8%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
What is our place in nature?
Whether humans are masters of nature, members of nature, or makers of nature is not a question climate science can settle. It depends on what nature is, what we are, and what kind of relationship is possible between us.
Embedded in a web — partners with the more-than-human world.
On these views, humans were never outside nature, and the question of our 'place in' it is the question of how to live within the relations that already constitute us. Plants, animals, rivers, ancestors, descendants are not resources or stage scenery; they are kin and …
Roads not taken
Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform. (50%) ·
Nature is partly what we make of it — concepts, practices, and minds shape the world. (15%) ·
Subject to a real natural order we did not make. (12%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
Should we colonize space?
The drive to extend human presence beyond Earth is sometimes framed as the next chapter of stewardship, sometimes as hubris, sometimes as escape from problems we ought to solve here. Which it is depends on what we take our relationship to nature to be.
Colonisation continues the work that ended the wisdom of seven-generation thinking.
On relational views, space colonisation is the abstract endpoint of the same pattern that produced ecological crisis on Earth: humans treating themselves as separate from the more-than-human world they are actually inside. To go to Mars in the spirit of leaving Earth is to leave …
Roads not taken
Cultivating worlds beyond Earth is the next form of stewardship. (50%) ·
The 'space frontier' is partly what we make of it. (15%) ·
Nature includes its limits; colonisation is bounded by what the cosmos allows. (12%)
31 mainstream positions
Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
Editing the genome cuts into the relational fabric; we should be very slow.
14%
What happens to "you" when you die?
You were always a pattern. The pattern propagates.
18%
Is environmental damage ever truly permanent?
Loss is part of cycles; what disappears returns in another form.
18%
Can a civilization recover from collapse?
Civilization rises and falls in cycles; recovery is structural to history.
18%
Does the second law of thermodynamics mean something morally?
Local entropy increase is part of a cycle; the moral category is participation in the cycle.
18%
Could causation work backwards?
Time is structured as return; 'forward' and 'backward' are local features of the cycle.
18%
Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us?
Memory and anticipation are phases of a cycle that visits both directions.
18%
Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it?
Within a cycle there is a direction; across the cycle there isn't.
18%
Does history have a direction or meaning?
History is the gradual unfolding of improvement or liberation.
23%
Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
Truth is mind-independent, universal, accessible in principle to all.
66%
Does environmental harm in another country bind me morally?
Moral obligation tracks the relations one is in; distance does matter, structurally.
50%
Is reality fundamentally digital?
No — continuous divine sustaining act, the Tao that knows no joints, the One's self-disclosure.
44%
Are there indivisible units of experience?
No — continuous divine presence; consciousness is the unbroken witness.
44%
Is memory stored or reconstructed?
Held in continuous divine or ancestral remembering — neither stored discretely nor purely reconstructed.
44%
Can prayer for someone far away affect them?
Prayer reaches because God or a cosmic ordering acts on the prayed-for.
38%
Are coincidences ever more than coincidence?
What looks like coincidence is providence — there is no such thing as a real coincidence.
38%
Are the dead morally present to the living?
The dead are present through divine memory, communion of saints, or ancestor presence.
37%
What makes someone the same person over time?
You are your body — continuity is bodily continuity.
36%
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
Same body, same person — even when the cognitive pattern has changed.
36%
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
Different body, different person — you died in the scanner.
36%
Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom?
The human observer is in time, but God's vantage is not — and foreknowledge is not foreordering.
34%
Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless?
Meditation participates in a real eternity — divine or cosmic — that the bounded human observer ordinarily cannot reach.
34%
Does prayer change God's mind?
God sees from outside time; prayer doesn't change God's mind, but it is part of how providence is enacted.
34%
Should we trust expert testimony when we can't verify it?
Trust expertise whose conclusions a competent mind can in principle reproduce.
31%
Is religious revelation a real source of knowledge?
Revelation is evaluable by reason — and not above it.
31%
Does an LLM 'know' the things it correctly produces?
An LLM can produce correct outputs but not reason to them; useful, not knowing.
31%
Could an AI have a mind that matters?
An AI’s standing is constituted by the relations it enters.
14%
Is salvation, liberation, or fulfillment individual or communal?
Liberation is the realization of cosmic or species self.
14%
How is knowledge of reality produced?
Through careful description of lived experience.
12%
Do animals have moral standing comparable to humans?
An animal's standing is constituted by its place in the relational fabric.
11%
Could a fetal brain organoid in a petri dish be conscious?
The organoid's standing is constituted by the relations of care around its production.
11%
Information · 4 dilemmas, all mainstream
Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
Information is lost when a mind forgets; matter and energy continue, but the pattern is gone.
50%
Does deleting your data online destroy something real?
Information is genuinely lost when the substrate that hosted it goes; deletion really destroys.
50%
Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
The information dissipates with the substrate; restoration is in principle impossible.
50%
Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
The offense is locally constituted by its substrate; when the substrate dissolves, the offense genuinely passes away.
50%
Jump to school (208)
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