What is an organism?

Everything is a something – or is it? Professor John Dupre considers the difference between substantialist and processualist metaphysics in this talk on the nature of “things”.

Following Aristotle, philosophers have generally assigned organisms to the category of a substance or – roughly, a kind of “thing”. Professor John Dupre of the University of Exeter argues that they should rather be seen as a kind of process: in this talk, he will explain the difference between a substantialist and a processualist metaphysics, and why the latter provides a much better account of the nature of an organism – as well as the important philosophical implications of this view for understanding the nature of the human.