Perspectives on reality as processes and event - from Heidegger to non-duality and beyond

What if our reality was fundamentally dynamic and interrelated - a process? Current developments in both science and technology provide abundant data and arguments for such a dynamic reconceptualization of reality. Our world is proving to be a dynamic process unfolding across all scales, from subatomic particles to galaxies. Living beings are processes that stand in complex, co-constitutive, reciprocal, evolving relations, jointly forming malleable, changing, and evolving environments, niches and biospheres. These insights, as well as the impact of digital technologies, and the current move from economies of ownership to sharing economies, shows the need for a shift in the way we view and engage with material resources, life, nature and reality.

The key premise of this project is that our conceptual resources and the way we think, conceptualise and argue, are not capable to come to terms with all this emerging interrelated dynamism: overall they remain predicated on stable, individual entities, and therefore tend to devalue or even ignore the relational and dynamic aspects of our world. This project seeks to addresses fundamental issue by developing a way of thinking, a language or a conceptual scheme, that is adequate to the networked complexity that current conceptual resources simply cannot grasp.

Drawing upon the works of seminal process thinkers such as Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger, Whitehead, and Deleuze, mystic ways of talking about what cannot be said, as well ideas developed by non-dual thinkers like Nagarjuna or Shankara this project is an invitation to explore the dynamic and complex nature of reality and ways to speak about what is not self-identical and constantly changing, using the tools of phenomenology, Heidegger’s philosophy of the event, process ontology, mysticism and/or non-dual wisdom traditions.

Diversity statement

Our research community thrives on the diversity of students and staff which helps to make the University of Dundee a UK university of choice for postgraduate research.  We welcome applications from all talented individuals and are committed to widening access to those who have the ability and potential to benefit from higher education.