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4216Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.This collection of essays explores the metaphysical thesis that the living world is not made up of substantial particles or things, as has often been assumed, but is rather constituted by processes. The biological domain is organised as an interdependent hierarchy of processes, which are stabilised and actively maintained at different timescales. Even entities that intuitively appear to be paradigms of things, such as organisms, are actually better understood as processes. Unlike previous attemp…Read more
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841A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of BiologyIn Daniel J. Nicholson & John Dupré (eds.), Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, Oxford University Press. 2018.This chapter argues that scientific and philosophical progress in our understanding of the living world requires that we abandon a metaphysics of things in favour of one centred on processes. We identify three main empirical motivations for adopting a process ontology in biology: metabolic turnover, life cycles, and ecological interdependence. We show how taking a processual stance in the philosophy of biology enables us to ground existing critiques of essentialism, reductionism, and mechanicism…Read more
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488Darwin’s Legacy: What Evolution Means TodayOxford University Press. 2003.Charles Darwin transformed our understanding of the universe and our place in it with his development of the theory of evolution. 150 years later, we are still puzzling over the implications. John Dupr presents a lucid, witty introduction to evolution and what it means for our view of humanity, the natural world, and religion. He explains the right and the wrong ways to understand evolution: in the latter category fall most of the claims of evolutionary psychology, of which Dupr gives a witherin…Read more
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343The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of ScienceHarvard University Press. 1993.With this manifesto, John Dupré systematically attacks the ideal of scientific unity by showing how its underlying assumptions are at odds with the central conclusions of science itself.
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278The Solution to the Problem of the Freedom of the WillPhilosophical Perspectives 10 385-402. 1996.It has notoriously been supposed that the doctrine of determinism conflicts with the belief in human freedom. Yet it is not readily apparent how indeterminism, the denial of determinism, makes human freedom any less problematic. It has sometimes been suggested that the arrival of quantum mechanics should immediately have solved the problem of free will and determinism. It was proposed, perhaps more often by scientists than by philosophers, that the brain would need only to be fitted with a devic…Read more
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228Discussion. In defence of the Baldwin effect: a reply to WatkinsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (3): 477-479. 2000.
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227Elliott Sober did Darwin write the origin backwards? Philosophical essays on Darwin’s theoryBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (4). 2013.
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215What's the Fuss about social constructivismEpisteme 1 (1): 73-85. 2004.The topic of this paper is social constructivist doctrines about the nature of scientific knowledge. I don't propose to review all the many accounts that have either claimed this designation or had it ascribed to them. Rather I shall try to consider in a very general way what sense should be made of the underlying idea, and then illustrate some of the central points with two central examples from biology. The first thing to say is that, on the face of it, some doctrine of the social construction…Read more
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214Promiscuous Realism: Reply to WilsonBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (3): 441-444. 1996.This paper presents a brief response to Robert A. Wilson's critical discussion of Promiscuous Realism [1996]. I argue that, although convergence on a unique conception of species cannot be ruled out, the evidence against such an outcome is stronger than Wilson allows. In addition, given the failure of biological science to come up with a unique and privileged set of biological kinds, the relevance of the various overlapping kinds of ordinary language to the metaphysics of biological kinds is gre…Read more
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166The Metaphysics of EvolutionInterface Focus 7 (5): 1-9. 2017.This paper briefly describes process metaphysics, and argues that it is better suited for describing life than the more standard thing, or substance, metaphysics. It then explores the implications of process metaphysics for conceptualizing evolution. After explaining what it is for an organism to be a process, the paper takes up the Hull/Ghiselin thesis of species as individuals and explores the conditions under which a species or lineage could constitute an individual process. It is argued that…Read more
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165Varieties of Living Things: Life at the Intersection of Lineage and MetabolismPhilosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 1 (20130604). 2009.We address three fundamental questions: What does it mean for an entity to be living? What is the role of inter-organismic collaboration in evolution? What is a biological individual? Our central argument is that life arises when lineage-forming entities collaborate in metabolism. By conceiving of metabolism as a collaborative process performed by functional wholes, which are associations of a variety of lineage-forming entities, we avoid the standard tension between reproduction and metabolism …Read more
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161In defence of classificationStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 32 (2): 203-219. 2001.It has increasingly been recognised that units of biological classification cannot be identified with the units of evolution. After briefly defending the necessity of this distinction I argue, contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy, that species should be treated as the fundamental units of classification and not, therefore, as units of evolution. This perspective fits well with the increasing tendency to reject the search for a monistic basis of classification and embrace a pluralistic and pragma…Read more
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159Is ‘Natural Kind’ a Natural Kind Term?The Monist 85 (1): 29-49. 2002.The traditional home for the concept of a natural kind in biology is of course taxonomy, the sorting of organisms into a nested hierarchy of kinds. Many taxonomists and most philosophers of biology now deny that it is possible to sort organisms into natural kinds. Many do not think that biological taxonomy sorts them into kinds at all, but rather identifies them as parts of historical individuals. But at any rate if the species, genera and so on of biological taxonomy are kinds at all, there are…Read more
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156Living CausesAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 87 (1): 19-37. 2013.This paper considers the applicability of standard accounts of causation to living systems. In particular it examines critically the increasing tendency to equate causal explanation with the identification of a mechanism. A range of differences between living systems and paradigm mechanisms are identified and discussed. While in principle it might be possible to accommodate an account of mechanism to these features, the attempt to do so risks reducing the idea of a mechanism to vacuity. It is pr…Read more
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152Life as ProcessEpistemology and Philosophy of Science 57 (2): 96-113. 2020.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 n…Read more
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145A fine book, but who’s it for?Metascience 21 (1): 175-177. 2011.A fine book, but who’s it for? Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-3 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9582-9 Authors John Dupré, ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis), University of Exeter, Byrne House, St. German’s Road, Exeter, EX4 4PJ UK Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796
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145Towards a processual microbial ontologyBiology and Philosophy 28 (2): 379-404. 2013.Standard microbial evolutionary ontology is organized according to a nested hierarchy of entities at various levels of biological organization. It typically detects and defines these entities in relation to the most stable aspects of evolutionary processes, by identifying lineages evolving by a process of vertical inheritance from an ancestral entity. However, recent advances in microbiology indicate that such an ontology has important limitations. The various dynamics detected within microbiolo…Read more
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132Metagenomics and biological ontologyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38 (4): 834-846. 2007.Metagenomics is an emerging microbial systems science that is based on the large-scale analysis of the DNA of microbial communities in their natural environments. Studies of metagenomes are revealing the vast scope of biodiversity in a wide range of environments, as well as new functional capacities of individual cells and communities, and the complex evolutionary relationships between them. Our examination of this science focuses on the ontological implications of these studies of metagenomes a…Read more
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123From molecules to systems: the importance of looking both waysStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40 (1): 54-64. 2009.Although molecular biology has meant different things at different times, the term is often associated with a tendency to view cellular causation as conforming to simple linear schemas in which macro-scale effects are specified by micro-scale structures. The early achievements of molecular biologists were important for the formation of such an outlook, one to which the discovery of recombinant DNA techniques, and a number of other findings, gave new life even after the complexity of genotype–phe…Read more
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121The lure of the simplisticProceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2002 (3). 2002.This paper attacks the perennial philosophical and scientific quest for a simple and unified vision of the world. Without denying the attraction of this vision, I argue that such a goal often seriously distorts our understanding of complex phenomena. The argument is illustrated with reference to simplistic attempts to provide extremely general views of biology, and especially of human nature, through the theory of evolution. Although that theory is a fundamental ingredient of our scientific worl…Read more
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117Are There Genes?Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 56 16-17. 2005.Contrary to one possible interpretation of my title, this paper will not advocate any scepticism or ontological deflation. My concern will rather be with how we should best think about a realm of phenomena the existence of which is in no doubt, what has traditionally been referred to as the genetic. I have no intention of questioning a very well established scientific consensus on this domain. It involves the chemical DNA, which resides in almost all our cells, which is capable of producing copi…Read more
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115The tree of life: introduction to an evolutionary debate (review)Biology and Philosophy 25 (4): 441-453. 2010.The ‘Tree of Life’ is intended to represent the pattern of evolutionary processes that result in bifurcating species lineages. Often justified in reference to Darwin’s discussions of trees, the Tree of Life has run up against numerous challenges especially in regard to prokaryote evolution. This special issue examines scientific, historical and philosophical aspects of debates about the Tree of Life, with the aim of turning these criticisms towards a reconstruction of prokaryote phylogeny and ev…Read more
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108Human kinds and biological kinds: Some similarities and differencesPhilosophy of Science 71 (5): 892-900. 2004.This paper compares human diversity with biological diversity generally. Drawing on the pluralistic perspective on biological species defended in earlier work (2002, chs. 3 and 4), I argue that there are useful parallels to be drawn between human and animal kinds, as there are between their respective sources in cultural evolution and evolution generally. This view is developed in opposition to the insistence by sociobiologists and their successors on minimizing the significance of culture. The …Read more
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University of ExeterDepartment of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology
Egenis, Centre for the Study of Life SciencesProfessor
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
Metaphysics |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |
Metaphysics |