Abstract

Peirce’s cosmogonic philosophy of Nature represents a radical rethinking of the idea of emergence, replacing the traditional metaphysics of mechanism that was dominant within the science of the day with the idea of a chance world as the base or grounding condition of the general order of Nature. The result is a novel and potentially revolutionary account of emergent evolution that sees both the conditions of mechanism and generalized conformity to law as emergent conditions that come into being through evolutionary processes operating at a cosmological scale. By grounding evolutionary cosmogony in the idea of chance Peirce’s philosophy of Nature represents a radical and important departure from much of the emergentist tradition. Most importantly, it offers the groundwork for a general theory of emergence that would see emergent phenomena as generally predictable and explicable part of the general order of Nature as such.