Bøker av Markus Eronen

The concept of emergence has found its way back to the mainstream ofphilosophy. The air of mysticism that earlier surrounded the concept has disappeared,and it is no longer considered dubious to use expressions like "emergent properties" or"emergent phenomena".The tradition of British Emergentism that began with John Stuart Mill fadedbefore the middle of the 20th century when positivist and reductionist ideas started todominate the field of philosophy. However, by the 1970s it was becoming clear thatthe reductionist approaches could not convincingly account for mental phenomena.This lead to the development of different nonreductive theories and the return ofemergentism.The most central concept in this new emergentism is irreducibility. The idea isthat although mental properties depend on physical properties and supervene on them,they can never be reduced to them. This idea is also evident in the works of the BritishEmergentists, particularly in C. D. Broad's The Mind and its Place in Nature (1925).The high-flown evolutionary and cosmological theories of the classic emergentiststhat are probably the reason for the bad reputation of emergentism are not a part of thecurrent debate.The most difficult problem that a current emergentist has to face is theproblem of mental causation. The problem is this: if the world is fundamentallyphysical, as emergentism supposes, how can emergent mental properties have causalpowers? If they have a role in causing physical events, it seems that physical eventshave causes that are outside the scope of physics, and physics alone is not enough toexplain all physical events. This is an unacceptable outcome. If emergent mentalproperties don't have causal powers, it is not clear in what sense they exist at all.There is no solution to this problem in sight.