website introducing Zubiri and his works
FUNDACIÓN XAVIER ZUBIRI
Often proposed as a modern-day successor to Aquinas. (The same claim is made about Lonergan.) I don't know much about his reasoning, but his followers oppose him to Aristotelian metaphysics, and that makes me suspicious.
Plus:
The Philosophy Homepage of Jaap Bax
He uses crystals as an analogue for understanding life. The problem is that
crystals may not be substantial unities, but rather the product of interactions between individual substances, the constitutents of the crystals.
As for organization and structure--one finds similar reasoning in the writings of chaos theorists and those proposing non-reductionist alternatives to the dominant understanding of life. While simpler substances may be ordered towards combining or cooperating with other substances by their very nature, still, the whole that is an organism is more than just a set of such substances and the systems they form one with another. The whole is "ontologically" prior to its parts.
