British emergentism

This chapter discusses the history of the British Emergentist movement from John Stuart Mill to Broad, with a focus just on the issue of why there are many sciences. It addresses the issue of whether there are emergent properties in the sense in question. The chapter deals with a few remarks about appeals in contemporary physics to a different notion of emergence. Mill's distinction between the mechanical and the chemical modes of the conjoint action of causes ignited the British Emergentist movement. The idea that the natural world has a hierarchical structure is first explicitly articulated in the British Emergentist literature in S. Alexander's Space, Time, and Deity. In Emergent Evolution, Lloyd Morgan embraced Alexander's view of ascending levels of reality and proposed an evolutionary cosmology inspired by Alexander's claim that Charles Darwin's principle of adaptation extends "below the level of life". The sciences are concerned with respective emergent orders of the ascending hierarchy.