Emergence – still trendy after all these years

Abstract

Ever since the heyday of British Emergentism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (notwithstanding a relatively silent period for a few decades after British Emergentism fizzled out in the 1930s), discussions of emergence have been a fairly constant source of titillation as well as controversy and confusion. Different authors have used the terms “emergence” and “emergentism” to characterize a myriad related but distinct conceptions, spanning fields as various as physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, robotics and philosophy.