SPECIAL ISSUE ON SCIENTIFIC PROCESS ONTOLOGY AND METAPHYSICS - A THEMATIC INTRODUCTION

Foreword The reasons that encouraged me to propose a Special Issue for Manuscrito on processual thought in the philosophical-scientific perimeter are primarily rooted in the naturalist spirit intrinsic to process models. The appeal these models have had on my academic and research journey stems largely from their emphasis on the dynamism and relationality of entities, their mutual interdependence, and their contingency, which simultaneously allows for avoiding both reductionist and/or foundationalist approaches and those uncomfortable dualistic fragmentations or “bifurcations” of nature, as Whitehead (1920) would put it. Furthermore, in my view, processual thought revives the original core of the philosophical and scientific approach to understanding natural reality, which is essentially transient, transformative, and evolutionary.1 Today, this kind of theoretical model plays an important role in the ongoing debate across many scientific disciplines, from physics (Rovelli, 2016) to biology (Dupré, 2012; Landa et al., 2024), chemistry (Stein, 2004; Córdoba et al., 2024), and cognitive and psychological sciences (Bickhard, 2024), to name just a few examples. In short, the processual approach is increasingly recognized as a capable and suitable conceptual framework for describing complex and inherently dynamic, interactive natural phenomena. For these reasons, together with the entire Editorial Board of Manuscrito, and in collaboration with all the authors who participated in the Call for Papers for this Special Issue, as well as all the reviewers involved- to whom I extend my heartfelt thanks and my apologies for my inexperience and any mistakes-we aimed to offer a modest contribution to the processual philosophical-scientific thought. The following thematic introduction is intended to offer some general coordinates, to provide the interested scholar with the conceptual framework necessary for a proper understanding of the contributions in this volume.2