Paul Humphreys argues that many of the problems affecting accounts of emergence arise from a philosophical tradition overly committed to synchronic reduction, and has been too focused on problems in philosophy of mind. He develops a novel account of diachronic ontological emergence called transformational emergence, shows that it is free of the problems raised in synchronic accounts, gives plausible examples of transformational emergence within physics and chemistry, and explains how the central ideas fit into a well-established historical tradition that includes John Stuart Mill, G. E. Moore, ... More

Paul Humphreys argues that many of the problems affecting accounts of emergence arise from a philosophical tradition overly committed to synchronic reduction, and has been too focused on problems in philosophy of mind. He develops a novel account of diachronic ontological emergence called transformational emergence, shows that it is free of the problems raised in synchronic accounts, gives plausible examples of transformational emergence within physics and chemistry, and explains how the central ideas fit into a well-established historical tradition that includes John Stuart Mill, G. E. Moore, and C. D. Broad. He also provides a comprehensive assessment of current theories of emergence, offering a way into what is by now a very large literature on the topic. The book classifies those theories, provides criteria for emergence, and argues that there is no single unifying account of emergence. Reevaluations of related topics in metaphysics are provided, including fundamentality, physicalism, holism, methodological individualism, and multiple realizability. The relations between scientific and philosophical conceptions of emergence are assessed, with discussion of examples such as self-organization, ferromagnetism, cellular automata, and nonlinear systems.