After examining different authors and approaches, what can we say about the ontological status of organisms? Even if the answer to this question might seem obvious to a biologist, it is not clear what place organisms occupy in contemporary philosophy. As we know, the discussion about organisms appeared in Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement and has taken on different configurations during the recent history of philosophy. As Hui suggests, ‘Kant's Critique of Judgment imposes the organic as the condition of philosophizing, which is to say that for any philosophy to be, it has to be organic’ (Hui 2021: 16). But what does it mean that phi-losophy has to be organic? An organic form of thinking continued in the early twentieth century in the works of Whitehead and Bergson, and also became prominent in the later twentieth century, where it manifested itself in systems theory, process philosophy and cybernetics (Hui 2021: 54). As we have seen, the organic condition continues to be a preoccupation in the philosophies of Simondon, Ruyer, Deleuze and Guattari, and also takes new turns in the works of contemporary thinkers such as Stiegler, Malabou, Latour and Haraway. In one way or another, these thinkers reveal the organic as a condition of philosophy and thus can be seen as precursors to organism-oriented ontology. Rather than concentrating on individuals and identities, contemporary philosophy is more and more interested in processes, developments, entanglements and changes; in other words, it is defined by organic features and conditions. It was Kant, again, who found that a biological model of epigenesis could be useful for theoretical thinking because it opens the possibility of imagining ‘pure reason’ as an organic system that is self-organising, self-maintaining, creative and unpredictable.

Now, in retrospect, we can say that all the authors discussed in this book take some specific features characteristic of organic beings and make them the centre of their philosophy. The first feature, shared by all authors, is processuality: the idea that processes and individuations have ontologi-cal priority over formed individuals. In this respect, Simondon's insight that physical, biological, psychosocial and technical entities develop in an analogous way is very important. Simondon clearly demonstrates that the organic condition can be extrapolated towards other systems.