Contact:Nel-Mari Loock
- +27218082652
Location: Wallenberg Research Centre, STIAS
Register here by 21 February 2023
John Dupré, Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of
Exeter and STIAS Donald Gordon Fellow will present a public lecture with
the title Human Processes.
Abstract
It is common to think about the world as containing things,
sometimes assembled into bigger things, all obeying a set of physical
laws. I want to propose a wholly different worldview. Think instead of a
lawless world of chaotic and entangled process. In this chaos eddies
emerge, with the ability to channel some of the energy in the
surrounding chaos into the maintenance of pattern or order. Organisms
are a prime example of such processes, and humans, as organisms should
also be understood as processes.
Another key process in biology is the lineage or species. Lineages
have evolved to become increasingly coherent processes, notably through
sexual reproduction and sociality. Humans are also part of such a
process, stretching back through the millennia, the lineage out of which
they evolved. The human species has evolved a unique kind of
cooperation, also reflecting unique features of the human organism.
In this talk I will describe these two kinds of process, the organism
and the lineage, which interact with one another in a process of mutual
stabilisation. I shall try to illustrate the value of this perspective
on human life, by showing how it provides insight into the ways we
distinguish kinds among humans, including kinds sometimes thought to be
biological, notably race and gender, but also indisputably cultural
kinds, such as nation, tribe or religion.
John Dupré is Professor of the Philosophy of Science at
the University of Exeter, where he was the founding Director of Egenis,
The Centre for the Study of Life Sciences. He specialises in the
philosophy of biology. His publications include: The Disorder of Things (1993); Human Nature and the Limits of Science (2001); Humans and Other Animals (2002); Darwin’s’ Legacy (2003); Processes of Life (2012); and The Metaphysics of Biology
(2022). The main focus of his research for the last 15 years has been
developing a process metaphysics of life, which resulted in his 2018
anthology, edited with Daniel Nicholson, Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology.
Dupré is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Past
President of the Philosophy of Science Association.