Abstract
«Life, Consciousness and Symbolism. An Essay on Natural Hierarchy». The problem
presented here belongs to the philosophy of nature and to metaphysics. It is thus concerned with the
philosophical interpretation of facts as well as with the way some thinkers extend such facts and
interpretations to justify one doctrine or other. My aim is twofold: in the first place I describe a plausible
way of conceiving the natural hierarchy by giving a brief outline of several kinds of natural systems; in
the second place, I make some observations about the explanation of such a hierarchy. This reflection is
guided by the ideal of elaborating a comprehensive naturalism capable of avoiding both the excessive
reductionism of materialism and scientism on the one hand, and the excessive division between living and
non-living matter imagined by vitalist and spiritualist thinkers on the other. These are my main assertions:
(I) Nature is composed of emergent systems. (II) There is a hierarchy of systems and a hierarchy of
natural strata. (III) Nothing in the formation of strata and systems happens by chance: everything is the
outcome of a multiplicity of different kinds of causes. (IV) The formation of new strata and systems is
causally and spatiotemporally continuous. (V) Finally, we do not have the appropriate concepts to
describe and explain adequately the natural hierarchy ― this is why, for instance, the emergence of
consciousness seems so mysterious.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2010 Asociacion de Filosofía Eikasía