Emergentism

 ( Emergence ) 

In 1925, C. D. Broad published The Mind and its Place in Nature. He addressed the question of whether biology reductionism to chemistry and onwards to physics. He suggested this could involve a mechanist answer, that all material is alike and all science is as well; or an emergentist view, that while material is all alike, there could be levels of organisation with what were later called emergent properties at each level.

Samuel Alexander proposed that a (human) mental process emerges from a neural process and that living systems, and those with mind, have "new emergent qualities" that do not occur at lower levels. Later philosophers have taken up Alexander's epistemological position, arguing either that the properties of higher levels (complex systems) cannot be predicted from understanding of lower levels, or that the properties can be described at the higher level (such as biology) but are not reducible to the concepts and behaviour of the lower level (such as physics).

• Cahoone, Lawrence, The Orders of Nature SUNY Press (2013).
• Clayton, Philip and Paul Davies, eds., The Re-emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion. Oxford University Press (2008).
• Gregersen Niels H., eds., From Complexity to Life: On Emergence of Life and Meaning. Oxford University Press (2013).
• Jones, Richard H., Analysis & the Fullness of Reality: An Introduction to Reductionism & Emergence. Jackson Square Books (2013).
• Laughlin, Robert B., A Different Universe Basic Books (2005).
• MacDonald, Graham and Cynthia, Emergence in Mind. Oxford University Press (2010).
• Morowitz, Harold J., The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex. Oxford University Press (2002).

• Emergent Properties in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Emergentism in the Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, 2007.
• Reduction and Emergence in Chemistry, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.