Kerim Can Kıraç

This dissertation examines the historical transformation of emergentist thinking through its changing relation to mechanism, with particular emphasis on life, mind, agency, and freedom. Beginning with Kant, Hegel, and Schelling, it reconstructs German Idealism as a major source of later anti-reductionist and emergentist intuitions. It then traces how Schopenhauer and Darwin altered this intellectual landscape before examining First Wave Emergentism in Mill, Bain, and Lewes; Second Wave Emergentism in Alexander, Morgan, and Broad; and the transition toward contemporary weak emergence and non-reductive physicalism. Two diagnostic concepts organize the inquiry: the “Stoic’s Dream,” which asks whether reason and agency can be reconciled with an entirely mechanistic world, and the “Transfer of Powerlessness,” which reformulates the problem of reduction in terms of the dependence of higher-level properties on lower-level physical facts. The dissertation argues that twentieth-century developments in evolutionary theory, neuroscience, cybernetics, functionalism, and dynamic complex systems progressively expanded the explanatory scope of mechanism. Third Wave Emergentism largely abandoned the special laws and causal novelty defended by classical emergentists while retaining their anti-reductionist vocabulary. Through an analysis of Dennett and the Logical Encapsulation Strategy, the dissertation argues that this synthesis produces an unstable compromise: emergent agency risks becoming a heuristic or descriptive abstraction rather than a genuinely novel causal power.

Naturalism has typically been entangled with a physicalist view. Physicalism, on the other hand, falls short of accounting for qualitative states of mental phenomena. The hard problem of consciousness seems to be a natural epistemic boundary in such a way that we do not even have any conceptualization as to how we can possibly account for mental states in physicalist terms in the future, which leads us to some version of causal/ontological plurality in the sense that it does not seem possible to explain everything with the same parameters even though the world fundamentally consists in a single substance. If plurality in multiple levels of scientific explanation is necessary, I argue that strong emergentism is, as a metaphysical framework, the best candidate to account for this fact. I will tackle two major physicalist views by Kim and Sider. Kim shows us that non-reductive physicalism is a bankrupt project whereas Sider’s physicalism that postulates a pure and complete fundamental level renders higher-level phenomena (including mental reality) metaphysically spurious. In relation to Kim and Sider’s accounts, I will try to elaborate on my view that physicalism, when pursued to the end, is inherently reductive and ultimately falls short of accounting for the mental reality. I emphasize that the causal identification of brain and mind rests on an arbitrary carving of world, namely a description of the world which cannot be intrinsic to nature. These are the main reasons why I conclude that our revised naturalism should be disentangled from physicalism and embrace the causal/ontological plurality of strong emergentism without falling for substance dualism.