Chapter 15 The Emergence of Mind: A Dualistic Understanding Antonella Corradini 15.1 Emergentism as Monism and Its Critics The aim of this essay is to show that emergentism in the philosophy of mind should be understood as a dualistic position. Before exposing my thesis I would like to say something about emergentism. It is a philosophical movement that was initi- ated in Great Britain in the first quarter of the twentieth century by thinkers such as S. Alexander (1920), C. Lloyd Morgan (1923), C.D. Broad (1925) and others. From a methodological viewpoint, emergentism strives to safeguard the autonomy of the so-called special sciences. It also supports an image of reality as structured into hierarchical levels of increasing complexity. According to British Emergentism, there are properties of complex systems, the emergent ones, that cannot be reduced to those of less complex systems. The concept of irreducibility can be traced back at the ontological level by and large to the concept of non-deducibility. By saying that a property of an emergent system, for example liquidity, is non-deducible, we mean that the belonging of that property to the emergent system cannot be logically deduced from the laws governing lower-level components, that is to say the atomic micro-structure. This implies that the theory which describes the properties at the lower-lever is incomplete as regards the properties occurring at the higher-level. In spite of the British Emergentists’ commitment to non-reductivism they have all been in favour of ontological monism. This allows us to better understand why in the present-day debate emergentism in philosophy of mind has often been assimilated to non-reductive physicalism. Both positions are supposed to have in common a commitment to a monistic materialistic ontology, though combined with the claim that higher-level properties, such as the psychological ones, are not reducible to the physical basic properties. Jaegwon Kim, one of the most resolute advocates of the similarities between emergentism and non-reductive physicalism, goes so far as to declare the latter as a form of emergentism, and to see in the recent success of non-reductive physicalism a renewal of the emergentistic atmosphere of the 20s A. Corradini (  ) Catholic University of Milan Largo A. Gemelli, 1 20123 Milan, Italy e-mail: antonella.corradini@unicatt.it A. Carsetti (ed.), Causality, Meaningful Complexity and Embodied Cognition, Theory and Decision Library A 46, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3529-5 15, c  Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 265