Wei Wu

According to a recent trend in accounting for the notion of emergence, we can make sense of emergence in a nihilist ontology, in the sense that mereological atoms can collectively instantiate emergent properties without any appeal to composite wholes. In this article, I argue that this account has limitations in capturing the essence of emergence. While the nihilist ontology offers a new perspective to shed light on the relation between emergent properties and their bearers, it is difficult for the nihilist ontology to establish a principled distinction between emergent and non-emergent properties. After presenting several advantages for emergentists to embrace composition, I conclude that we should regard composite wholes rather than mereological atoms as bearers of emergent properties.

Emergentism has been suggested to be a traditional rival to physicalism. The reason is that the emergentist is committed to non-physical configurational forces, which are never acceptable to physicalists of all stripes. In this paper, however, I will argue that commitment to non-physical configurational forces is not essential to emergentism. Instead, nothing prevents such configurational forces from being physical. Although emergentism is incompatible with microphysicalism, which asserts that physical fundamental forces come into play only at the atomic level of organization, it is compatible with physicalism per se, which allows physical fundamental forces to come into play at certain relatively higher levels of organization. As a result, there is no real objection to the view that emergentism is compatible with physicalism.

The emergentist account of composition says roughly that emergence entails composition. After briefly explaining the basis of this account, I defend it against an objection presented by some nihilists (Cornell in American Philosophical Quarterly 54(1) (2017): 77–87; Caves in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99(1) (2018): 2–28), who maintain that a plurality of objects can collectively instantiate emergent properties without composing any further object. I will show that this view risks undermining a central requirement of emergence.