Samuel Alexander (1859–1938)

Australian-born British philosopher, Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and later White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow. Author of Space, Time, and Deity (1920), the Gifford Lectures that gave classical British emergentism its metaphysical system. ¹

Key Contribution: Emergence as a Space-Time Category

Alexander’s ontological framework: all reality is Space-Time, and its uniform process is motion. What we call qualities — matter, life, mind, deity — are complexes of motions that appear at successively higher levels of organization.

His signature notion is the emergence of “new qualities”:

Life, when it appears, is a new quality — a new “categorial” character of the higher-level complex — emerging from physico-chemical processes when matter reaches a certain order of complexity. So with mind (“deity” is the next quality still emerging, the nisus toward it). ¹

Two features of his doctrine matter most for emergence:

1. Emergent qualities are “recognised, not explained.” The emergent quality, once constituted by the lower-level complexity, is enjoyed/contemplated and then described, not deduced — the lineage of Broad’s non-deducibility and Bedau’s computational intractability.
2. Natural piety — “the method of science” is to accept with natural piety the emergent qualities as brute facts of nature (naturalistic acceptance, not theological explanation). This prefigures the modern insistence that accepting emergence is not “God of the gaps.”

Context

• The metaphysical system behind the classical emergentism that cd-broad stated with more analytic precision (Broad 1925 postdates Alexander 1920)
• Lloyd Morgan (1922) popularized the term “emergent evolution” in the same period

Relationship to “God of the gaps”

The article’s central dialectic: the “God did it” objection hits brute strong emergence, not emergence as such. Alexander’s “natural piety” is the classical precedent for accepting emergent qualities without positing a supernatural cause — the higher-level quality is constituted by the physical arrangement itself. ¹

Relationship to This Wiki

• Classical metaphysical system underlying emergence
• His space-time monism is a naturalistic metaphysics; contrasts with the theistic arguments catalogued in psychophysical-harmony — interestingly, some contemporary defenders of psychophysical harmony critique naturalistic acceptance of psychophysical laws as a “lucky alignment” problem
• Same period as hylomorphism-revival debates: Alexander’s “qualities of complexes” is a modern analog of form as the form of an organized whole

See Also

• emergence — The concept his system grounds
• cd-broad — The precise analytic statement of the shared program
• john-stuart-mill — Origin of the non-aggregation idea

References

• Alexander, S. (1920). Space, Time, and Deity (2 vols.). London: Macmillan. Gifford Lectures, Glasgow 1917–18.
• O’Connor, T. & Wong, H. Y. — “Emergent Properties”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ¹
• Emmet, D. (1992). The Passage of Nature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Footnotes

1. raw/articles/emergence-without-magic-nonreductive-materialism.md ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴