Process Ontology
This not is about process or flow based conceptions of reality, in biology and elsewhere.
The need to be clear about metaphysical commitments: to avoid the confinement and curtailment of conventions.
Dupré, John, and Daniel Nicholson. ‘A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology’. In Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, edited by Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré, 3–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Cf.:
- procedural ethics
- Biosemiotics
- Chronobiology
- Lifecycle
The living world is a hierarchy of processes, stabilized and actively maintained at different timescales (molecules, cells, organs, organisms, populations, etc.)
Things are abstractions from more or less stable processes. These abstractions can be very useful if the focus is on the properties of substances that remain stable within the period of consideration.
Importance of subjectivity, signs but also temporality in representation.
Temporal scales:
- physiological functioning (feeding, digesting, respiring, using muscles, nerves, glands, etc.), in periods that are shorter that the lifetime of an organism
- development (ontogeny), during one life cycles, repeated a few times or not repeated
- heredity, the passage of at least a few generations; the province of genetics
- evolution, in the course of many life-times.
Waddington, Conrad Hal. The Principles of Embryology. London: Routledge, 1956.
Process Archeology
Malafouris, Lambros, Chris Gosden, and Amy Bogaard. ‘Process Archaeology’. World Archaeology 53, no. 1 (2021): 1–14. https://doi.org/10/gtqsz3.
References
Dupré, John, and Daniel Nicholson. ‘A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology’. In Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, edited by Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré, 3–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Meincke, Anne Sophie. ‘Autopoiesis, Biological Autonomy and the Process View of Life’. European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9, no. 1 (2018): 5. https://doi.org/10/gf8srh.
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