Metaphysical Emergence as Higher-Level Naturalness

In this chapter I explore an approach to metaphysical emergence which works by distinguishing between fundamentality and naturalness and endorsing the thesis that there are natural properties at non-fundamental levels. I take as my starting point Elizabeth Barnes’s proposal to characterize the emergent as fundamental but dependent, criticizing it on the ground that it undermines the theoretical work we need fundamentality to do. However, I think Barnes is on the right track: emergence is linked to a selective metaphysical privileging of higher-level subject-matters. I suggest an alternative account of the metaphysically emergent as non-fundamental but (at least relatively) natural, and show how this suggestion can be implemented in a simple subject-matter-based framework.