I also argued in my doctoral dissertation that energy is a vaguely defined concept, and I outlined the history of the concept of energy starting all the way back from Aristotle’s energeia, to show that our modern concept of energy is really just a modern iteration of the ancient bias to derive change from the changeless (e.g., modern energy in the 19th century tells us that energy is constantly transforming, but the quantity of change in the universe is eternally conserved).

In this paper that I wrote applying Bergson’s philosophy to critiquing the concept of energy, I essentially take a process-philosophical approach to analyzing energy and how we might expand this concept to account for mental phenomena as well.

philpapers.org/archive/…