...This introduction explains the concept of emergence and examines how it is treated in contemporary philosophy and science. Emergence relates to phenomena which arise from and depend on some more basic phenomena yet are simultaneously autonomous from that base. This introduction provides examples...

...The following chapters present and elaborate on the leading themes about emergence in contemporary philosophy. Due to the conceptual subtlety and multifaceted nature of emergence as a topic of discussion, philosophical precision is required so that it is easier to understand what emergence...

...This chapter explores an obscure argument of contemporary philosophy believed to bring about serious problems for mental causation. The “exclusion argument,” as it is commonly referred to, presents devastating consequences for any position that considers mental properties to be real, including...

...A central debate regarding perception in contemporary philosophy concerns the disjunctive theory of perceptual experience. Until the 1960s, philosophers of perception generally assumed that a veridical perception (a perceptual experience that presents the world as it really is) and a subjectively...

... that possible answers may be discovered. The chapter focuses on contemporary philosophy, particularly the work of Ian Hacking, and the contributions of the German and French traditions to the discussion of these topics. In contrast to Merleau-Ponty’s Bergson, who is an eminently cogent proto...