Nominalism, Emergence and Process
摘要
This chapter further investigates important ontological implications of process ontology and attempts to find a place for emergence within a univocal process nominalist framework. Traditional accounts of emergence often rely on transcendent essences or epiphenomenalist supervenience relations. By contrast, in this context emergence is understood as a self-fracturing of being. Emergent properties, from qualia to symbolic thought, are intelligible not as independent ontological levels but as novel configurations within continuous processes. To develop this, the chapter mobilizes Deleuze’s notion of intensity, understood topologically rather than representationally, to explain how discontinuous structures arise from continuous deformations. This allows emergence to be accounted for without invoking universals or transcendent causes. The view challenges both reductive physicalism and panpsychism, showing that novelty can arise immanently without collapsing into reduction or dualism.