PhD Student Proposal Exams

(Yogi)

It's been a big day for "Pushing the Boundaries"! We are very happy and proud to congratulate Paul Poledna and Kevin Purkhauser, our two PhD students on the project, for passing their proposal exams in the Vienna Doctoral School of Philosophy today.

Kevin will work on an analysis of the concept of organizational emergence, specifically as it is used in the life sciences. This kind of emergence is ontological and diachronic (i.e. it occurs over time) involving the appearance of new kinds or levels of organization of matter, in contrast to computational emergence, for instance, which has to do with the predictability of a physical process with a flat kind of organization. The origin of life is a good example for organizational emergence, but also other major transitions in evolution that led to multicellular organisms and, ultimately, consciousness in some animals.

Paul's project is also looking at the organization of biological systems, but from a complementary angle. He will have a close look at the concept of constraints, and how restricting the behavior of interacting physico-chemical processes leads to the higher-level emergence of living organization. In particular, he will be taking a Piercian approach to study the co-constructive dynamics of self-manufacturing living systems, and will look at how constraints (which have more to do with what is not there than what is there) fit into the picture of a science whose aim it is to uncover the causal structure of reality.

We're working hard on a joint paper on organizational complexity and emergence that will hopefully appear on your radar at some point later this year.

But this is just the beginning. The project is now properly on its way! Stay tuned for further updates.