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Abstract
Process ontologies, that is, ontological theories that operate with processes as their basic explanatory entities, are commonly taken to aim at dispelling the notion of a thing and to embrace ‘wild flux.’ This is a serious isunderstanding. The main challenge for a process-ontological scheme – as for any revisionary scheme, for that matter – is to define the notion of a thing, which appears to be the most important general concept in our ordinary interactions with the world. I introduce a new process-ontological framework called DMT (Dynamic Mass Theory) based on the category of subjectless activities or ‘dynamic masses.’ Dynamic masses are non-countable, non-particular individuals which are related by a non-transitive mereological relation. I try to show that DMT can be used profitably to fulfill the desiderata for a theory of things: to define the ‘thinghood,’ persistence, contingency and material consitution of things. Concentrating on the issue of thinghood, I discuss the ‘bundle problem’ in DMT. Due to the hyperintensionality of dynamic masses this problem arises in exacerbated form, since when we ask which constituent activities are to enter into a certain complex ‘thing activity,’ we also need to take into account that in DMT different mereological descriptions of a thing yield different wholes. I offer a definition of thinghood or thing activities that capitalizes on this apparent disadvantage of a multi-level mereological complexity: a thing is a complex activity that is spatially minimally homoeomerous, temporally maximally homoeomerous, is transportable, and has functional form.