ABSTRACT
An increasing number of philosophers of biology are currently advocating process ontology as an ontological framework able to capture the profound dynamicity of biological reality. Living beings are claimed to be processes rather than things or substances. However, due to a lack of reflection on the ontological nature of processes, the implications of this process ontological turn in the philosophy of biology are not sufficiently clear. In this chapter, I show how Bergson provides helpful conceptual resources for clarifying the notion of process, on which basis then different versions of ‘process biology’ can be evaluated. I argue that Bergson’s analyses of movement and change make a powerful case against the common four-dimensionalist interpretation, according to which organisms would be four-dimensional aggregates of portions of spacetime. If the ‘process biologists’ are serious about the fundamentally processual constitution of life and living beings, they ought to endorse a notion of process that does not reduce movement and change to static thing-like existents. Bergson’s concept of ‘duration’ – indivisible temporal continuity – can serve as a model.
