Tradition

Emergentism

Overview

Emergentism is a philosophical position holding that complex systems possess properties, behaviors, or laws that arise from the interaction of their fundamental parts but are not reducible to or predictable from them. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them. Within philosophy of science, emergentism is analyzed both as it contrasts with and parallels reductionism.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Philosophers who discussed Emergentism

• Georg Simmel
• Mario Bunge
• Cornelius Castoriadis
• Samuel Alexander
• James Franklin (philosopher)

Related ideas

• Philosophy
• John Stuart Mill
• A System of Logic
• Physics
• Philosophy of science
• Reductionism
• Chemistry
• System
• C. D. Broad
• Biology
• Epistemology
• Samuel Alexander

Place in the tradition

Part of Outline of philosophy.

Narrower topics:

• System

Explore Emergentism in the interactive graph →