Relazioni ed entità emergenti: da Broad e Lloyd Morgan a Kim

The author tries to argue that J. Kim’s exclusion argument is not incompatible with the acceptance of a certain form of ontological emergence and that C. D. Broad’s and C. Lloyd Morgan’s doctrines should be actually taken as weakly emergentist doctrines – even if Lloyd Morgan’s doctrine can be also interpreted in strongly emergentist terms. The crucial point of such versions of emergentism – what grounds the very occurrence of emergence – lies in external relations’ being involved in the emergence bases. First, the author distinguishes between weak and strong ontological emergence and between internal and external relations. Secondly, he reconstructs Broad’s and Lloyd Morgan’s doctrines. Thirdly, he examines Kim’s exclusion argument and he argues for the general conclusion of the article. In conclusion, insofar as physicalists accept that non-physical entities can depend in special ways on physical ones (e.g., by involving irreducible, external relations in the dependence bases), they can also accept certain forms of ontological emergence.