Since around 500BCE, when Heraclitus declared that everything changes while Parmenides maintained that everything stays the same, the dichotomy of process and substance has been at the heart of Western philosophy. However, the view of Parmenides translated into Democritean atomism has provided the philosophy that has guided science since the seventeenth century. The thesis of the book that I plan to write is that this was a profound philosophical mistake, especially for the life sciences. In biology (including medicine) everything does indeed change, and the attempt to represent life as a hierarchy of thing-like entities formed into quasi-mechanisms has been increasingly misleading. The book will explain why this is such a serious mistake and also explore some of the benefits that could accrue for a biology that took seriously the fundamentally and pervasively processual character of life.

Related to Process Biology

Human Processes - STIAS Public lecture by John Dupré

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Human Processes - STIAS Public lecture by John Dupré

Register here by 21 February 2023 John Dupré, Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Exeter and STIAS Donald Gordon Fellow will present a public lecture with the title Human Processes.
 Thumbnail for Talking things, processes, organisms, species, lineages, gender, race and culture - STIAS Public lecture by John Dupré

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Talking things, processes, organisms, species, lineages, gender, race and culture - STIAS Public lecture by John Dupré

It’s common to think about the world as containing things, sometimes assembled into bigger things, all obeying a set of physical laws.