Philosophical accounts of emergence have been explicated in terms of logical relationships between statements (derivation) or static properties (function and realization). Jaegwon Kim is a modern proponent. A property is emergent if it is not explainable by (or reducible to) the properties of lower level components. This approach, I will argue, is unable to make sense of the kinds of emergence that are widespread in scientific explanations of complex systems. The standard philosophical notion of emergence posits the wrong dichotomies, confuses (...) compositional physicalism with explanatory physicalism, and is unable to represent the type of dynamic processes (self-organizing feedback) that both generate emergent properties and express downward causation. (shrink)

The psychical researcher William Mackenzie (1877-1971) was born in Genoa of Scottish parents and spent almost his entire life in Italy, while formally remaining a British citizen. He studied at several Italian and European Universities, graduating in Biology and Philosophy, and in 1905 he established a marine biology laboratory in Quarto dei Mille. During that period he published his first important work, Alle Fonti della Vita (To the Sources of Life) (Mackenzie 1912a), and his speculative nature and his passion for (...) the philosophy of biology are already evident. In that work, Mackenzie claims that materialism is insufficient to explain biological phenomena, and he drew the foundations of a neovitalistic theory which asserted the specificity of a biological realm ruled by an intelligent and psychic energy needed to explain the teleological complexity of living organisms. (shrink)

In this article, I examine Luhmann’s, Bunge’s and others’ views on emergence, and argue that Luhmann’s epistemological construal of emergence in terms of Totalausschluss (total exclusion) is both ontologically flawed and detrimental to an appropriate understanding of the distinctive features of social emergence. By contrast, Bunge’s rational emergentism, his CESM model, and Wimsatt’s characterization of emergence as nonaggregativity provide a useful framework to investigate emergence. While researchers in the field of social theory and sociology tend to regard Luhmann as the (...) sole representative of systems theory, the latter has been characterized by its diversity, and the writings of such systems theorists as Mario Bunge deserve more (critical) attention from social researchers than they receive at present. Finally, this article suggests that the perennial debate over methodological individualism and holism in social science may make real progress if such ambiguous terms as reduction and reductionism are elucidated before they are employed. (shrink)