Proposes a new way of understanding the nature of metaphysics, focusing on nonreductionist emergence theory, both in ancient and modern philosophy, as well as in contemporary philosophy of science.

Diachronic emergence has recently been characterised as transformation. This aims to capture the thought that the entities that emerge are radically new or different. Transformation is hence closely linked with a central (but rarely raised) challenge for all emergentists: how to account for the identity and individuation of entities involved in emergence. With this challenge in view, I develop and probe four interpretations of transformation: addition, replacement, fusion, and transubstantiation. Of those, transubstantiation provides the most plausible response to the challenge (...) about identity. Accordingly, diachronic emergence is a transformative process whereby an individual passes from one primary kind to another. (shrink)

The notion of emergence has accompanied philosophy of science since the late XIX century, claiming that in some systems there are properties in certain levels that cannot be deduced from properties of their components as seen in more fundamental levels. Throughout the XX century, emergence has been characterized by four pillars: unpredictability, novelty, restriction and downward causation. These four pillars have been related to the assumption of a hierarchical order of reality in different levels of organization. In this paper, we (...) show that it is possible to explain the nature of the emergent properties through the nearly-decomposability criterion introduced by Herbert Simon. (shrink)