Last September 25-27 the final conference of the project “Science, Philosophy, and Theology. Latin American Perspectives”, run by the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion (University of Oxford), took place at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

María Echevarría -research assistant at the Philosophy Institute- participated with a contributed paper entitled: “Aciertos y debilidades de la concepción emergentista de la persona” [Strengths and weaknesses of the emergent conception of the person].

Here you can read the abstract of the paper:

Some attempts to explain what the person is and the particular place she occupies in the universe resort to the notion of emergency, according to which entities of higher levels are constituted by the interaction of entities of lower levels, but are not reducible to them. This kind of explanation seems to be able to overcome some difficulties of physicalist reductionism, for which the only real thing is matter. In fact, physicalism does not account for the particular place of the person in the cosmos, but considers it a manifestation of matter, certainly a very complex one, but one that would not represent anything ontologically or qualitatively different. Therefore, this position does not consider man a special creature, but just a more complex one. From an emergentist perspective, as developed by Christian Smith (What is a person? 2010), the person is considered to emerge from certain human capacities, which in turn are emerging from the human body, particularly from the brain. Smith establishes a list of thirty human capacities that he considers “mediating” between the real human body and the real human person. He maintains that personhood does not consist in the sum of these capacities, but emerges from them. However, as he states, “the mechanisms of emergency can sometimes be a mystery” (Smith 2010, 43). That is, it would not be entirely clear how the person emerges from these capacities, how the human person is constituted. This paper will focus on the concept of emergence in relation to the notion of person, examining both its argumentative capacity against ontological reductionism and its possible difficulties.

Smith, Christian. 2010. What is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.