Jessica Wilson’s Metaphysical Emergence (2021) is an excellent and important book that brings together roughly twenty years of work on the ways in which one set of phenomena could be dependent on, and yet to some degree autonomous from, another set of phenomena. Wilson identifies the core shared ideas in the sea of mushy and contradictory usages of the term ‘emergence’, and articulates notions of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ emergence that (in the philosophy of mind case) correspond to nonreductive physicalism and dualism respectively. She distinguishes these positions, in part, by how they approach the well-known exclusion problem for mental causation. Wilson’s discussion of emergence and exclusion will be my focus in this commentary. What exactly does solving the exclusion problem require, and how exactly does her version of weak emergentism…
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