Against the traditional view of the living world as fundamentally composed of enduring things, this book argues for the radical alternative is that it essentially consists of processes. Biology is the study of the processes that constitute living beings, and the things biologists study ultimately derive their existence from more basic processes.

• Foreword


• Part I: Introduction


• 1: John Dupré and Daniel J. Nicholson: A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology


• Part II: Metaphysics


• 2: Peter Simons: Processes and Precipitates


• 3: Rani Lill Anjum and Stephen Mumford: Dispositionalism: A Dynamic Theory of Causation


• 4: James DiFrisco: Biological Processes: Criteria of Identity and Persistence


• 5: Thomas Pradeu: Genidentity and Biological Processes


• 6: Johanna Seibt: Ontological Tools for the Process Turn in Biology: Some Basic Notions of General Process Theory


• Part III: Organisms


• 7: Daniel J. Nicholson: Reconceptualizing the Organism: From Complex Machine to Flowing Stream


• 8: Denis Walsh: Objectcy and Agency: Towards a Methodological Vitalism


• 9: Frédéric Bouchard: Symbiosis, Transient Biological Individuality, and Evolutionary Processes


• 10: Argyris Arnellos: From Organizations of Processes to Organisms and Other Biological Individuals


• Part IV: Development and Evolution


• 11: Paul Griffiths and Karola Stotz: Developmental Systems Theory as a Process Theory


• 12: Flavia Fabris: Waddington's Processual Epigenetics and the Debate over Cryptic Variability


• 13: Laura Nuño de la Rosa: Capturing Processes: The Interplay of Modelling Strategies and Conceptual Understanding in Developmental Biology


• 14: Eric Bapteste and Gemma Anderson: Intersecting Processes are Necessary Explanantia for Evolutionary Biology, but Challenge Retrodiction


• Part IV: Implications and Applications


• 15: Stephan Guttinger: A Process Ontology for Macromolecular Biology


• 16: Marta Bertolaso and John Dupré: A Processual Perspective on Cancer


• 17: Ann-Sophie Barwich: Measuring the World: Olfaction as a Process Model of Perception


• 18: Anne Sophie Meincke: Persons as Biological Processes: A Bio-Processual Way Out of the Personal Identity Dilemma

Daniel J. Nicholson is a research fellow currently based at Egenis, The Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, at the University of Exeter. Previously, he held appointments at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas in Tel Aviv, as well as at the Konrard Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research near Vienna. His work is characterized by an integrated and strongly interdisciplinary approach to the history and philosophy of biology, with a specific interest in the ontology of living systems and the adequacy of mechanistic explanations to make sense of them. He is also interested in general topics in the philosophy of science and in theoretical biology, broadly construed.
John Dupré is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Egenis, The Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, at the University of Exeter. He has formerly held posts at Oxford, Birkbeck College, London, and Stanford, and visiting chairs at the University of Amsterdam and Cambridge. He has wide-ranging interests in the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of science generally, and naturalistic, empirically grounded metaphysics. He is a former president of the British Society for Philosophy of Science, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.