Alexander: Obsessed with “living structure.” He wants us to notice that things in the world—buildings, sand grains, tree leaves—sometimes feel alive. Not in a biological sense, but in an aesthetic, relational, deeply human sense. He insists this can’t be explained away by physics or systems theory alone, because they’re stuck in substance-thinking. He pushes for a metaphysics of experience. He coins his “principle of unfolding wholeness,” basically saying: reality is always busy being itself, but never quite finished, always shifting forward.

Whitehead: Says everything is a process, not a substance. Even the tiniest physical events are also subjective experiences (a stance known as panexperientialism, which sounds like a very trippy diet plan). He and Alexander both think the “self” isn’t some isolated ego, but part of this universal hum of lived experience.

Simondon: Starts at the cosmic scale. His big word is individuation—the way things emerge as distinct from a “pre-individual field.” So instead of seeing pre-existing centers (Alexander’s way), he’s focused on how centers crystallize out of the whole. It’s like Alexander describes how snowflakes grow once seeded, and Simondon describes the conditions that make seeding possible in the first place. His “transindividuals” live in the in-between, neither purely objective nor purely subjective.