'Symbiotic Processes' workshop, organised Prof John Dupre and Dr Stephan Guttinger

This workshop is part of the ERC-funded project, “A Process Ontology for Contemporary Biology (ProBio)” led by Prof. John Dupré. The project explores the advantages, problems, and implications of a fully processual understanding of living systems. The near omnipresence of symbiosis has been one of the main motivations for the project. The dependence of most life cycles on profound inter-connections with other symbiotic life cycles has been recognised by many philosophers and biologists as problematizing standard assumptions about the nature and boundaries of the organism. This poses ontological questions that, we believe, are much more tractable for a process ontology that is not committed to unambiguous boundaries between entities. This workshop will bring together scientists with various interests in symbiosis and philosophers concerned with biological ontology with a view to an in depth exploration of these basic issues.