Timothy O’Connor
American philosopher; Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington. Works in metaphysics (emergence, free will, theism) and philosophy of mind. 1
The Metaphysics of Emergence (with Hong Yu Wong, 2005)
Their paper “The Metaphysics of Emergence” (Noûs 39(4): 658–678) is a major contemporary defense of metaphysical emergence with novel causal powers — i.e., strong emergence taken seriously as a defensible position rather than dismissed as obscurity. 1
Core commitments:
- Emergent properties are dependent on and realized by lower-level conditions, but their causal powers are not reducible to those of the base
- This requires taking downward causation seriously: emergent properties genuinely influence lower-level processes — the move that most directly collides with Kim’s causal-closure/exclusion argument, which they address rather than evade
- They defend the intelligibility of synchronic causal determination by higher-level states against the charge that all causation must be diachronic microphysical production
Context
- Hong Yu Wong (then University College London / Budapest University of Technology and Economics) — co-author
- Together with jessica-wilson’s powers-based framework, O’Connor & Wong supply the strongest pro-strong-emergence case that the emergence page must weigh against Kim and against Bedau-style weak emergence
- O’Connor also works on philosophy of religion — relevant when weighing whether “strong emergence” silently reimports theological commitments (the article’s “God of the gaps” concern)
Relationship to This Wiki
- The strongest contemporary defense of the strong-emergence horn on emergence
- Their downward-causation defense is the direct reply-target for james-woodward’s interventionist dissolution of the exclusion problem
- Their work frames the open question the article ends on: does phenomenal consciousness require only organizational emergence, or strong ontological emergence? — the same territory as psychophysical-harmony and the hard problem
See Also
- emergence — The strong-emergence defense this page must weigh
- jaegwon-kim — The exclusion argument they engage head-on
- jessica-wilson — The alternative powers-based taxonomy
- psychophysical-harmony — Where strong emergence meets theism-adjacent arguments
References
- O’Connor, T. & Wong, H. Y. (2005). “The Metaphysics of Emergence.” Noûs 39(4): 658–678. JSTOR 1
- O’Connor, T. (2020). Theism and Ultimate Explanation (rev. ed.). Routledge.
- O’Connor, T. & Wong, H. Y. — “Emergent Properties”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Timothy O’Connor CV, Indiana University