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Created page with "{{Bibliographic Record |Title=Making sense of emergence |Resource Type=journal article |Author=Jaegwon Kim, |Year=1999 |Abstract=It has been about a century and half since the..."
{{Bibliographic Record
|Title=Making sense of emergence
|Resource Type=journal article
|Author=Jaegwon Kim,
|Year=1999
|Abstract=It has been about a century and half since the ideas that we now
associate with emergentism began taking shape.1 At the core of
these ideas was the thought that as systems acquire increasingly
higher degrees of organizational complexity they begin to exhibit
novel properties that in some sense transcend the properties of their
constituent parts, and behave in ways that cannot be predicted on
the basis of the laws governing simpler systems. It is now standard
to trace the birth of emergentism back to John Stuart Mill
and his distinction between “heteropathic” and “homopathic” laws,2
although few of us would be surprised to learn that the same
or similar ideas had been entertained by our earlier philosophical
forebears.3 Academic philosophers – like Samuel Alexander and
C.D. Broad in Britain, A.O. Lovejoy and Roy Wood Sellars in
the United States – played an important role in developing the
concept of emergence and the attendant doctrines of emergentism,
but it is interesting to note that the fundamental idea seems to have
had a special appeal to scientists and those outside professional
philosophy. These include the British biologist C. Lloyd Morgan,
a leading theoretician of the emergentist movement early in this
century, and, more recently, the noted neurophysiologist Roger W.
Sperry.
|Page Status=Stub
|Journal=Philosophical Studies
|Volume=95
|Number=1
|Pages=3-36
}}
|Title=Making sense of emergence
|Resource Type=journal article
|Author=Jaegwon Kim,
|Year=1999
|Abstract=It has been about a century and half since the ideas that we now
associate with emergentism began taking shape.1 At the core of
these ideas was the thought that as systems acquire increasingly
higher degrees of organizational complexity they begin to exhibit
novel properties that in some sense transcend the properties of their
constituent parts, and behave in ways that cannot be predicted on
the basis of the laws governing simpler systems. It is now standard
to trace the birth of emergentism back to John Stuart Mill
and his distinction between “heteropathic” and “homopathic” laws,2
although few of us would be surprised to learn that the same
or similar ideas had been entertained by our earlier philosophical
forebears.3 Academic philosophers – like Samuel Alexander and
C.D. Broad in Britain, A.O. Lovejoy and Roy Wood Sellars in
the United States – played an important role in developing the
concept of emergence and the attendant doctrines of emergentism,
but it is interesting to note that the fundamental idea seems to have
had a special appeal to scientists and those outside professional
philosophy. These include the British biologist C. Lloyd Morgan,
a leading theoretician of the emergentist movement early in this
century, and, more recently, the noted neurophysiologist Roger W.
Sperry.
|Page Status=Stub
|Journal=Philosophical Studies
|Volume=95
|Number=1
|Pages=3-36
}}