While some philosophers of history have argued that explanations in human history are of a fundamentally different kind than explanations in the natural sciences, I shall argue that this is not the case. Human beings are part of nature, human history is part of natural history, and human historical explanation is a species of natural historical explanation. In this paper I shall use a case study from the history of the American Civil War to show the variety of close parallels (...) between natural and human historical explanation. In both instances, I shall argue that these explanations involve narrative descriptions of causal mechanisms. I shall show how adopting a mechanistic approach to explanation can provide resources to address some important aspects of human historiographic explanation, including problems concerning event individuation, historical meaning, agency, the role of laws, and the nature of contingency. (shrink)

The philosophical discussion of emergence is often focused on properties of ‘wholes’ that are evaluated as emergent with respect to the properties of ‘parts’. Downward causation is, consequently, evaluated as some kind of causal influence of whole properties over parts properties. Yet, several important cases in scientific practice seem to be pursuing hypotheses of parts properties emerging from wholes properties, inverting the instinctive association of emergence with wholes. Furthermore, some areas of reflection which are very important for emergence, e.g., the (...) philosophy of consciousness, do not allow mapping properties onto part-whole organizations. The conceptual puzzle is solved by constructing a framework that disentangles the mereological dimension from the superventional dimension. By liberalizing the spatio-temporal allocation of emergent properties, the proposed dual framework could better capture the way in which emergence and downward causation are addressed in scientific practice. (shrink)