| Sumario: | Although emergentism initially intended to resolve the conflict between physicalism and dualism, interestingly, an avatar of this conflict inexorably remains within emergentism itself. Some emergentist views give the upper hand to dependence at the expense of distinctness (hence coming close to physicalism), while others favor distinctness over dependence (hence verging rather on dualism). According to one narrative about the history of the concept of I emergence i in metaphysics and philosophy of science, when British emergentists initially appealed to emergence in the early twentieth century, they aimed to lay the groundwork for a philosophy of nature that was supposed to constitute a middle course between two antagonistic worldviews: I reductive physicalism i and I non-physicalist dualism i . I Flat emergence i (against the canonical requirement that emergence ought to be exclusively construed as a hierarchical relation, such that its I relata i should belong to different "levels") (Guay & Sartenaer, [6], [7]; Humphreys, [8], [9]; Sartenaer, [15]).
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