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The Meanings of ‘emergence’ and Its Modes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Arthur O. Lovejoy
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Extract

There is an old and persistent tendency in the human mind to conceive of the causal relation as rationally explanatory, and therefore to assimilate it, vaguely or explicitly, to the logical relations of inclusion, implication, or equivalence. That ‘ there cannot be more in the effect than there is in the cause’ is one of the propositions that men have been readiest to accept as axiomatic; a cause, it has been supposed, does not ‘ account for ‘ its effect, unless the effect is a thing which the eye of reason could somehow discern in the cause, upon a sufficiently thorough analysis. This antipathy to the notion of an absolute epigenesis has left its effect, unless the effect is a thing which the eye of reason could somehow discern in the cause, upon a sufficiently thorough analysis. This antipathy to the notion of an absolute epigenesis has left its mark deep and wide upon the history of thought; it appears, indeed, at the very outset of Western speculation in the struggles of the physiologers with the supposed difficulty of admitting qualitative change. Two of the later phases of what may be named the preformationist assumption about causality may pertinently be remembered here.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 2 , Issue 6 , April 1927 , pp. 167 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1927

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References

page 167 note 1 The greater part of this paper was read as a communication to the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy at Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A., on September 14, 1926. The four paragraphs preceding the last have been added since the publication of General Smuts’s Holism and Evolution, part of the doctrine of which is similar to that here set forth.

page 169 note 1 Taylor, A. E. in Evolution in the Light of Modern Knowledge (1925), p. 460.Google Scholar

page 170 note 1 Boodin, J. E., op. cit. (1925), pp. 9, 44, 67, 82, 96–8, 101Google Scholar, and passim.

page 174 note 1 For a fuller discussion of functional emergence, cf. the writer’s “ The Discontinuities of Evolution,” in University of California Publications in Philosophy, vol. V.Google Scholar

page 174 note 2 Cf. SirMackenzie’s, Leslie paper in Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume No. VI, “ Methods of Analysis,” 1926, pp. 56–62.Google Scholar

page 178 note 1 Drake, , Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925), pp. 97–100Google Scholar, 241–3.

page 180 note 1 Cf. e.g., Jeans, , in Evolution in the Light of Modern Knowledge, pp. 28–9Google Scholar, and Perrier, , La Terre avant I’histoire, 1920, pp. 64–81Google Scholar. Since the above was written, the point has been more fully argued by Jeans, in Nature, 12 4, 1926, Supplement, p. 40 and passim.Google Scholar