nucleation

LIT-1993: Emergence in Context: A Treatise in Twenty-First Century Natural Philosophy

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Properties4
StatusUnavailable — looked for 2026-11-03, not read. No lawful free copy was found: OpenAlex (no email sent, ADR-008) and Unpaywall (noreply@anthropic.com) mark the OUP book closed, with no open-access edition; the PhilPapers record links only to library access; booksellers sell it. The authors' view is read at second hand only in Bishop's SEP entry on chaos (NOTE-1535, THEORY-1333), which cites it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied.
Version2
Tagsmetaphysics, philosophy-of-science, complex-systems
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-1314 — Contextual emergence, on which an emergent phenomenon's parts are necessary but not sufficient, needs a functional boundary between the phenomenon and its context, without which the context could be folded into the base and the account collapse into weak emergence or global supervenience; and the subject of attention is contextually emergent in this sense, its boundary being the skull, meninges and brain stem, so that its macro-level patterns constrain micro-level activity with a power that is not reducible to the parts and needs neither downward nor circular causation

Graph View

Bishop, R. C., Silberstein, M., & Pexton, M. (2022). Emergence in Context: A Treatise in Twenty-First Century Natural Philosophy. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780192849786.001.0001.

Key takeaways

Not read. No lawful copy found (status note). Bishop’s own summary of its view is in the SEP entry, read in NOTE-1535 (THEORY-1333).

Standing in the record

The book-length account of contextual emergence, with Bishop and Atmanspacher 2006 (LIT-1987). Jennings quotes it for the constraint Bénard cells place on their fluid parcels (“these cells constrain or shape the states of motion accessible to fluid parcels”, p. 41, at LIT-1963 p. 20). The reading THEORY-1314 needs, to say whether Jennings’s boundary condition and causal reading go beyond its source.

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