I'd like the add to the latest posting from Carla Feldpausch.
The concept of emergence plays a key role in Roy Bhaskar's critical
realism. In his latest book "Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom," Verso
1993, Bhaskar writes on p. 49:
In emergence, generally, new beings (entities, structures, totalities,
concepts) are generated out of pre-existing material from which they
could have been neither induced nor deduced. There is a quantum leap,
or nodal line, of (one feels like saying) the materialized
imagination--or even, with Hegel, reason.... This is matter as
creative, as autopoietic. It seems, if it can be vindicated, to yield
a genuine ontological analogue of Hegelian preservative determinate
negation.
Chaos theory has been connected with emergence since its inception.
Prigogine and many others are trying to use chaos theory to theorize the
emergence of irreversible thermodynamics from reversible mechanics.
Hans G. Ehrbar [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Economics Department, 308 BuC (801) 581 7797
University of Utah (801) 581 7481
Salt Lake City UT 84112-1107 (801) 585 5649 (FAX)
