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Organisms, activity and being: on the substance of process ontology

Austin, Christopher

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Authors

Christopher Austin



Abstract

According to contemporary ‘process ontology’, organisms are best conceptualised as spatio-temporally extended entities whose mereological composition is fundamentally contingent and whose essence consists in changeability. In contrast to the Aristotelian precepts of classical ‘substance ontology’, from the four-dimensional perspective of this framework, the identity of an organism is grounded not in certain collections of privileged properties, or features which it could not fail to possess, but in the succession of diachronic relations by which it persists, or ‘perdures’ as one entity over time. In this paper, I offer a novel defence of substance ontology by arguing that the coherency and plausibility of the radical reconceptualisation of organisms proffered by process ontology ultimately depends upon its making use of the ‘substantial’ principles it purports to replace.

Citation

Austin, C. (2020). Organisms, activity and being: on the substance of process ontology. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 10(2), Article 13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-0278-0

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 4, 2020
Online Publication Date Feb 21, 2020
Publication Date May 31, 2020
Deposit Date Feb 12, 2020
Publicly Available Date Mar 3, 2020
Journal European Journal for Philosophy of Science
Print ISSN 1879-4912
Electronic ISSN 1879-4920
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 10
Issue 2
Article Number 13
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-0278-0
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1271280

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.





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