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Books : reviews

Sophie Gibb, Robin Findlay Hendry, Tom Lancaster, eds.
The Routledge Handbook of Emergence.
Routledge. 2019

Emergence is often described as the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts: interactions among the components of a system lead to distinctive novel properties. It has been invoked to describe the flocking of birds, the phases of matter and human consciousness, along with many other phenomena. Since the nineteenth century, the notion of emergence has been widely applied in philosophy, particularly in contemporary philosophy of mind philosophy of science and metaphysics. It has more recently become central to scientists’ understanding of phenomena across physics, chemistry, complexity and systems theory, biology and the social sciences.

The Routledge Handbook of Emergence is an outstanding reference source and exploration of the concept of emergence, and is the first collection of its kind. Thirty-two chapters by an international team of contributors are organised into four parts:

• Foundations of emergence
• Emergence and mind
• Emergence and physics
• Emergence and the special sciences.

Within these sections important topics and problems in emergence are explained, including the British Emergentists; weak vs. strong emergence; emergence and downward causation; dependence, complexity and mechanisms; mental causation, consciousness and dualism; quantum mechanics, soft matter and chemistry; and evolution, cognitive science and social sciences.

Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and metaphysics, The Routledge Handbook of Emergence will also be of interest to those studying foundational issues in biology, chemistry, physics and psychology.

Contents

Brian P. McLaughlin. British Emergentism. 2019
Paul Noordhof. Dependence . 2019
Kerry McKenzie. Fundamentality. 2019
John Bickle. Reduction. 2019
Umut Baysan. Emergence, function and realization. 2019
Alex Carruth. Strong emergence and Alexander's dictum. 2019
Carl Gillett. Emergence, downward causation and its alternatives: Critically Surveying a Foundational Issue. 2019
Sophie Gibb. The causal closure principle. 2019
Mark Pexton. Computational emergence: weak and strong. 2019
Jason Winning, William Bechtel. Being Emergence vs. Pattern Emergence: Complexity, Control, and Goal-Directedness in Biological Systems. 2019
Robert Bishop, Michael Silberstein. Complexity and feedback. 2019
Jessica Wilson. Between Scientism and Abstractionism in the Metaphysics of Emergence. 2019
Hong Yu Wong. Emergent Dualism in the Philosophy of Mind. 2019
David Robb. Emergent mental causation. 2019
Cynthia Macdonald, Graham Macdonald. Emergence and Non-Reductive Physicalism. 2019
Lynne Rudder Baker. Intentionality and Emergence. 2019
Robert Van Gulick. Emergence and consciousness. 2019
John Heil. Emergence and panpsychism. 2019
Stephen J. Blundell. Phase transitions, broken symmetry and the renormalization group. 2019
Tom McLeish. Soft Matter – An Emergent Interdisciplinary Science of Emergent Entities. 2019
Stewart Clark, Iorwerth Thomas. Emergence in Non-relativistic Quantum Mechanics. 2019
Tom Lancaster. The emergence of excitations in quantum fields: quasiparticles and topological objects. 2019
David Pines. Emergence: a personal perspective on a new paradigm for scientific research. 2019
Piers Coleman. Emergence and Reductionism: an awkward Baconian alliance. 2019
Christian Wüthrich. The emergence of space and time. 2019
Susan Stepney. Digital Emergence. 2019
Robin Findlay Hendry. Emergence in Chemistry: Substance and Structure. 2019
Emily Herring, Gregory Radick. Emergence in Biology: From Organicism to Systems Biology. 2019
Michel Morange. Emergence in the cell. 2019
George F. R. Ellis. Evolution, Information, and Emergence. 2019
Raymond Noble, Denis Noble. A-mergence of biological systems. 2019
Julie Zahle, Tuukka Kaidesoja. Emergence in the Social Sciences. 2019