Elizabethtown College Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Cognitive Science Minor Michael Silberstein is set to release his latest book, “Emergence in Context: a treatise in twenty-first century natural philosophy,” this July. The book was written in collaboration with Robert Bishop.
“This is my second book with Oxford University Press, so it certainly represents a milestone in my career,” Silberstein said. “On a more personal note, the topic of this book is the same as my dissertation topic and thus has been brewing in my head and in various journals for nearly 30 years. This book is the culmination of that process.”
As the book covers cases ranging from physics to cognitive neuroscience, the primary audience is philosophers of science and scientists from a multitude of different disciplines.
The term “emergence” represents the idea that the universe starts from nothing but quantum fields that somehow generate atoms and molecules, the cosmos, life, conscious minds, and culture. Silberstein and Bishop’s book speculates about how this might be possible.
“While it’s true that this book is a research monograph for experts, it’s all about the question of how nature creates order and complexity from disorder,” Silberstein explained. “Such beautiful patterns are so common in nature we take them for granted.”
About Michael Silberstein
In addition to his role at Elizabethtown College, Silberstein is Affiliated Faculty in the Philosophy Department, the Foundations of Physics Program, and a Fellow on the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park. His primary research interests are the foundations of physics and the foundations of cognitive science. He is also interested in how these branches of philosophy and science bear on more general questions of reduction, emergence, and explanation.
