Topic summary
Emergent phenomenon
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Emergence.
Anglophone philosophy
The first philosophers to use the term "emergent" in its philosophical sense were the "British Emergentists", who characterised life as an emergent phenomenon. This tradition has been dated back to John Stuart Mill's Composition of Causes (1843). In 1875, G. H. Lewes distinguished "emergent" from merely "resultant" phenomena: