Berlin 2012 – wissenschaftliches Programm

Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Aktualisierungen | Downloads | Hilfe

AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 1: "Condensed Metaphysics" I: Reduction and Emergence

AGPhil 1.3: Hauptvortrag

Montag, 26. März 2012, 11:30–12:15, E 020

Parts, Wholes and Emergence — •Andreas Hüttemann — Philoosphisches Seminar, Universität zu Köln, Albertus Magnus Platz, 50923 Köln

Emergence has been defined or explicated in a number of different ways. Typically the definiens contains terms such as "novelty", "irreducibility", "unpredictability", "holism", etc. For at least two reasons these attempts appear not to be particularly fruitful. First, there is no consensus on how to understand the terms that are invoked in the definitions or explications in question. Second, intuitions about whether certain phenomena should count as examples of emergent phenomena tend to diverge. There seem to be hardly any clear-cut cases against which a definition or explication of emergence could be tested.

In this paper I want to take a different approach towards an explication of concepts of emergence. I will look at certain influential reductionist projects. It is in the contexts of these projects that concepts of emergence have been formed. If we understand the aims of the reductionist projects we get a better hold on certain concepts of emergence, because they are usually conceived of as failures or limitations of reductionist projects.

More particularly I will look at a philosophical tradition of ontological reductionism and at a methodological reductionist project that has been discussed by physicists. Keeping these two sense of reductionism separate will help to disambiguate two different concepts of emergence. Critical phenomena provide a useful case study in this context because the case illustrates how a phenomenon can be a emergent in one sense but fail to be emergent in another sense.