In 2012, he offered the book Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology

In 2018, with his Exeter colleague D.J. Nicholson, he published Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology

In 2022, he delivered the Gifford Lectures on A Brief History of Form at the University of Aberdeen,[4] and again in 2023 at the University of Edinburgh on A Process Perspective on Human Life.

Dupré's "process perspective" argues

"that it is a mistake to suppose that processes require underlying things, or substances... Instead of thinking of processes as belonging to things, we should think of things as being derived from processes. This does not mean that things do not exist, even less that thing-concepts cannot be extremely useful or illuminating. What it does imply is that things cannot be regarded as the basic building blocks of reality. What we identify as things are no more than transient patterns of stability in the surrounding flux, temporary eddies in the continuous flow of process."

Everything Flows, p.12

Dupré identifies an essential difference between the familiar atoms and molecules of physics and chemistry and the organic macromolecules of biology. Information philosophy understands that difference as the role played by information in the processes that create new purely physical things and new living biological entireties. Physical processes are reductive and eliminative materialist. Biological processes are emergent and

But it is not until the emergence of life that information replication, information communication, and information processing begins. Only then is information itself used in the creation of new - living - information structures. Living things are biological information processors, forms through which matter and energy flows, with capabilities far beyond the electronic digital computers that cognitive scientists think provide a “computational theory of mind.”

Most important, living things have “purposes.” They engage in communications of information with other living things and with their environment. Their messaging is meaningful, allowing them to be active users of information - which makes them agents, compared to passive material things, whose structural information is largely inert and meaningless in itself.

Since the total of matter and energy in the universe is a conserved constant, it's the arrangement of the matter and energy that is the information. Information philosophy (and science) tells us who or what is doing the arranging. In physics and chemistry, the forces in processes creating more complex objects are purely passive. In all of biology the active forces creating more complex organisms deploy information templates (e.g., the "central dogma" of DNA to mRNA to proteins). At animal and human levels these active creative processes become intentional, "mind over matter."

As Dupré's colleague Anne Sophie Meincke stressed in a recent conference, living things are "agents." They introduce purpose into the universe.

We should note that where Dupré argues that "things cannot be regarded as the basic building blocks of reality," philosopher Trenton Merricks argues the exact opposite, defending "mereological nihilism, the idea that there are no composite objects, only "simples" arranged to look like objects. Or as Peter van Inwagen said in his 1990 book Material Beings, There are "no tables, only simples arranged tablewise."