Emergence – still trendy after all these years

John Michael

pp. 169-180

in: Richard Creath (ed), Rudolf Carnap and the legacy of logical empiricism, Berlin, Springer, 2012

Abstract

Ever since the heyday of British Emergentism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (notwithstanding a relatively silent period for a few decades after British Emergentism fizzled out in the 1930s), discussions of emergence have been a fairly constant source of titillation as well as controversy and confusion. Different authors have used the terms "emergence" and "emergentism" to characterize a myriad related but distinct conceptions, spanning fields as various as physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, robotics and philosophy.