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Philosophy
 Substance Philosophy
Substance philosophy can be traced back to the ancient Greek cosmology of ‘being’, advocated by Parmenides. ‘Being’ implies a homeostatic and entitative conception of reality. There are two versions of substance philosophy. One is the Neoplatonic ontology, manifested in Descartes in the 17th century, which insists on a completely unitary, incomposite ‘being’ (substance/matter) that is changeless in itself and exclusive of ‘becoming’ (process). For Descartes, there must be two kinds of ‘being’: that of the soul/mind and that of matter. Mind and matter are two separate entities.
The other version of substance philosophy is material atomism, ranging from the ancient Greek Democritus’s atomism to the modern Newtonian atomism. For atomists, substance is the aggregation of its divisible parts, but at the base level is atom, which is in itself changeless, a full ‘being’ exclusive of ‘becoming’.
With few differences, both versions of substance philosophy are commonly subscribed to fundamental ‘being’ ontology and regard substance/matter as enduring and changeless in itself.
Process Philosophy
From its beginning, substance philosophy has been challenged by process philosophy. Process philosophy has attracted great attention over the last century, and has exerted profound influences on later modern science (such as physics) as well as social sciences.
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, the teacher of Parmenides, has been recognised as the founder of process philosophy. For Heraclitus, reality is not a stable, materialised substance, but a matter of process reified in fundamental forces and fluctuating activities. Reality is constantly changing and in the process of ‘becoming’. Apparent stability is only an illusion. Heraclitus saw process as not only fundamental to reality, but also as pervasive all over the world – ‘everything flows’. His famous proverb was, ‘One cannot step twice into the same river’. Reality is just like the river, which is not a fixed object, but an ever-changing flow.
However, process thought did not attract great attention in Western societies until the early 20th century, when a number of philosophical explorers such as William James, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead contributed to the revitalisation of process philosophy. The basic idea of the processual world-view is that process, rather than substance, is the fundamental aspect of reality. Here, process refers to verbs of flowing, transforming, changing, and emerging. In process philosophy, reality is not a fixed and solid entity, but an on-going state of flux and instability.
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