Jessica M. Wilson, "Metaphysical Emergence" (Oxford UP, 2021)
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What is the central question about trees and consciousness that frames the episode?
Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor, and I love maps, so I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the Best Education Podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share a map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast online.
at oculi-mundi.com while you listen. Jerry's guests include Zakiya Suwel, who's an English broadcaster and writer on Finding Albion, Yosh Schmidt, who's the head of maps at the Zurich Central Library, Pat Seed, a U.S. historian on Ptolemy's world map, John Romero, who's a legendary video game producer on The Doom Game Creator, Elif Sharak, a well-known Turkish-British novelist, and Chet Van Duser, historian who will tell you about Martin Waldseemuller's Carta Marina of 1645. I highly encourage you to subscribe to What's Your Map? It's available on Apple, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms. Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel, along with Robert Talese, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Jessica Wilson, who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. Her new book, Metaphysical Emergence, is just out from Oxford University Press. Is an ordinary object like a tree nothing but its material makeup, or does reality include trees and other things above and beyond what they're made of?
How about consciousness? Is it nothing but neural activity, or is it something over and above it? Metaphysical emergence is a leading non-reductive theory of how we can be committed to a fully material world without accepting that everything reduces to fundamental physics. In metaphysical emergence, Wilson synthesizes scholarship on the idea of emergence and divides the existing proposals into two basic schemas, strong emergence and weak emergence. She elaborates the differences between the forms and the main objections to each form, and she stakes out controversial positions regarding the existence of phenomena that satisfy each form. For example, on her view, current evidence does not support the ideas that dynamically self-organizing complex systems or consciousness are strongly emergent.
Wilson's book promises to be a landmark in the theoretical literature on emergence and and on its applications.
How does Jessica Wilson introduce the concept of metaphysical emergence and its two main schemas?
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Jessica Wilson. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy. Hello, Carrie. Thanks for having me on. That's great. I'm very eager to talk about your new book, Metaphysical Emergence, a very, very important topic across a lot of different areas in philosophy, but in particular, from my perspective in philosophy of mind. And I'm glad that two of the main cases that you talk about are in the book are, you know, consciousness and free will. But yeah, so I'm really glad to be talking about, you know, you're bringing a lot of your work together into a big comprehensive discussion of the idea of metaphysical emergence. So can you tell a bit about yourself first before we get to the book itself?
You know, how you got to become a philosopher and how you came to write the book.
Yeah, sure. You know, it's actually related to the topic of the book. I had a kind of checkered history, you know, finding my way to philosophy. I actually first went to art school and then I felt I didn't quite have the vision or the chops for that.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central question about trees and consciousness that frames the episode?
0:00–3:04
2
How does Jessica Wilson introduce the concept of metaphysical emergence and its two main schemas?
3:04–10:59
3
What personal and academic background led Wilson to develop her theory of emergence?
10:59–21:53
4
How does Wilson define the basic conditions of metaphysical emergence (cotemporal material dependence and autonomy)?
21:53–33:06
5
What are the differences between strong emergence and weak emergence, and what are their key objections?
33:06–42:31
6
Why does Wilson argue that consciousness is likely weakly emergent rather than strongly emergent?
42:31–55:03
7
How does the emergence framework connect to the free‑will debate, linking weak emergence with compatibilism and strong emergence with libertarianism?
55:03–1:03:29
8
What future projects is Wilson working on and how do they extend the ideas from Metaphysical Emergence?
1:03:29–1:05:15
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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Jonathan Quong, "Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice" (Princeton UP, 2026)
Daniel Cohnitz and Jussi Haukioja, "Foundations for Metasemantics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Philippe Huneman, "When Metaphysics Meets Biology: Kantian Approaches to the Concept of An Organism" (Routledge, 2026)
Rivka Weinberg, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time" (Oxford UP, 2026)
PJ DiPietro, "Sideways Selves Travesti and Jotería, "Struggles Across the Américas" (U Texas Press, 2025)