The thesis of this paper is that our understanding of life, as reflected in the biological and medical sciences but also in our
everyday transactions, has been hampered by an inappropriate
metaphysics. The metaphysics that has dominated Western philosophy, and that currently shapes most understanding of life and
the life sciences, ...
The thesis of this paper is that our understanding of life, as reflected in the biological and medical sciences but also in our
everyday transactions, has been hampered by an inappropriate
metaphysics. The metaphysics that has dominated Western philosophy, and that currently shapes most understanding of life and
the life sciences, sees the world as composed of things and their
properties. While these things appear to undergo all kinds of
changes, it has often been supposed that this amounts to no
more than a change in the spatial relations of their unchanging
parts.
From antiquity, however, there has been a rival to this view, the
process ontology, associated in antiquity with the fragmentary
surviving writings of Heraclitus. In the last century it has been especially associated with the work of the British metaphysician
and logician, Alfred North Whitehead. For process ontology, what
most fundamentally exists is change, or process. What we are
tempted to think of as constant things are in reality merely temporary stabilities in this constant flux of change, eddies in the flux
of process.
My main claim in this paper will be that a metaphysics of this latter kind is the only kind adequate to making sense of the living
world. After explaining in more detail, the differences between
these ontological views, I shall illustrate the advantages of a process ontology with reference to the category of organism. Finally
I shall explore some further implications of a process ontology for
biology and for philosophy
