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CARL GILLETT
SAMUEL ALEXANDERS EMERGENTISM: OR, HIGHER CAUSATION FOR PHYSICALISTS
ABSTRACT. Samuel Alexander was one of the foremost philosophical gures of his day and has been argued by John Passmore to be one of fathers of Australian philosophy as well as a novel kind of physicalist. Yet Alexander is now relatively neglected, his role in the genesis of Australian philosophy if far from widely accepted and the standard interpretation takes him to be an anti-physicalist. In this paper, I carefully examine these issues and show that Alexander has been badly, although understandably, misjudged by most of his contemporary critics and interpreters. Most importantly, I show that Alexander offers an ingenious, and highly original, version of physicalism at the heart of which is a strikingly different view of the nature of the microphysical properties and associated view of emergent properties. My nal conclusion will be that Passmore is correct in his claims both that Alexander is signicant as one of the grandfathers of Australian philosophy and that he provides a novel physicalist position. I will also suggest that Alexanders emergentism is important for addressing the so-called problem of mental causation presently dogging contemporary non-reductive physicalists.
Samuel Alexander was born in Sydney, in 1859, and grew-up in Melbourne, though he spent his professional life as a philosopher in England at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester.1 Nonetheless, John Passmore has argued that Alexander played a key role in the genesis of Australian philosophy through his intellectual inuence on John Anderson, arguably one of its fathers.2 Given these credentials, one would expect that Alexander would be closely studied, yet, despite Passmores enthusiasm, Alexander is barely discussed by philosophers in Australia, apparently treated more as an embarrassing crazy uncle than an important intellectual forebear. And this type of divergence of opinion over the signicance of Alexanders work extends much more widely, both to his own time and to the contemporary debate over emergentism.
In his own day, Alexanders work was taken by many to be profound. For example, Whitehead said of his contemporaries, who obviously included Russell and Moore, that Alexander had the greatest and most important inuence upon his thinking.3 And C.D.
Synthese (2006) 153: 261296 Springer 2006 DOI 10.1007/s11229-005-5470-4
262 CARL GILLETT
Broad reported that Alexanders...