Amanda Bryant – författare

There has been a surge of recent interest in a family of phenomena that may broadly be described as emergent. This includes much lively and ongoing debate concerning whether any kind of emergence can be accommodated within a functionalist framework, whether emergence occurs at a time or over time, the role of context and constraint in emergence, and apparent downward causation in scientific case studies, as well as how ancient concepts of fusion, form, and transformation connect with contemporary accounts of emergence.Rethinking Emergence brings together historians of philosophy, philosophers of science, and metaphysicians in conversation to address these central questions and to delve into as-yet unexplored points of contact among their varied perspectives.

How do we know what is possible or impossible, what is inevitable or unattainable, or what would happen under which circumstances? Since modal facts seem distinctively mysterious and difficult to know, the epistemology of modality has historically been fraught with uncertainty and disagreement. The recent literature has been dominated by rationalist approaches that emphasise a priori reasoning (sometimes including direct intuition of possibility). Only recently have alternative approaches emerged which recognize a broader range of sources of modal knowledge. Yet even emerging non-rationalist views have tended to assign scientific investigation at best a supporting role. Our project in this book is to develop and defend a new approach to the epistemology of modal facts which assigns a central role to scientific investigation. According to modal naturalism, science (construed broadly) is our primary source of evidence concerning the modal facts.