EGENIS seminar: "The Disunity of Science and Unity of the World", Prof John Dupré (University of Exeter)

This talk reflects on the relations between the philosophy of science and metaphysics. I have tried to show for many years that these are essential to one another, though with respect to a view of metaphysics that remains a minority one, that metaphysics must be grounded in empirical science, a so-called “naturalistic” metaphysics. I begin by sketching the view of disunity of science articulated in my 1993 book, The Disorder of Things. I then trace the evolution of my ideas about the implications of this thesis to metaphysics, leading to the advocacy of the processual metaphysics that I have been defending more recently. The adoption of processual metaphysics enables a proper reconciliation between a disunified science and the intuitively compelling thesis that there is only one world. Finally, illustrating my view that metaphysics and science are mutually informing, I illustrate some scientific consequences of this processual metaphysics.