Abstract: "Types of emergence tend to get categorized as weak or strong. The consensus view is that weak emergence, while ubiquitous, is largely only epistemic, and that strong emergence while ontic in nature, simply doesn't exist. I will argue that there is another distinct kind of emergence that is well supported by science,
let us call it contextual emergence. After defining contextual emergence, I will give examples from quantum mechanics, epigenetics and developmental biology."

Michael David Silberstein is Professor of Philosophy at Elizabethtown College and Affiliated Faculty in the philosophy department at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is also a faculty member in the Foundations of Physics Program and a Fellow on the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences. He is an NEH Fellow. His primary research interests are foundations of physics and foundations of cognitive science, respectively. He is also interested in how these branches of philosophy and science bear on more general questions of reduction, emergence and explanation. His most recent book is Beyond the Dynamical Universe: Unifying Block Universe Physics and Time as Experienced (Oxford University Press, 2018). His next book project with Oxford is entitled Contextual Emergence (forthcoming).

The Sapientia Lecture Series is funded by The Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy.