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Alicia Juarrero, Carl A. Rubino
Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization have become vital focuses of interest not only in the fields of science and philosophy but also in the wider worlds of business and politics. This book presents a series of essays by thinkers who anticipated the significance of those issues and laid the foundations for their current importance. Readers of this book will encounter the important and varied figures of Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Charles Saunders Peirce, Henry Poincare, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and the British "Emergentists" Samuel Alexander, C. Lloyd Morgan, and C. D. Broad. They will also find essays by the South African thinker and statesman Jan Smuts, the American philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, the eminent physicist Erwin Schrodinger, two more recent thinkers on emergence, P. E. Meehl and Wilfred Sellars, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy, one of the founders of General Systems Theory.
In their detailed and comprehensive introduction to the collection, editors Alicia Juarrero and Carl A. Rubino set the essays in contexts stretching from Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel to some of the religious, scientific, and philosophical challenges we face today.
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p.4 As C. Lloyd Morgan notes, the term emergence, first proposed in the 1870s by George Henry Lewes in Problems of Life and Mind and then taken up by Wilhelm Wundt in his Introduction to Psychology, was coined precisely to identify instances in chemistry and physiology where new and unpredictable properties appear as products that are emphatically not the mere sum of the separate elements from which they arise.
[The Evolution of Life - Mechanism and Teleology, Henri Bergson, p.61-76]
p.61 I find, first of all, that I pass from state to state... Change is far more radical than we are at first inclined to suppose... there is no feeling, no idea, no volition which is not undergoing change every moment... The truth is that we change without ceasing, and that the state itself is nothing but change.
p.63 Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.
p.63 Doubtless, my present state is explained by what was in me and by what was acting on me a moment ago.
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