No 2 (2011)

The article focuses on philosophical aspects of theocosmogony in the so called Memphite Theology (the Shabaka Stone), one of the most prominent ancient Egyptian religious texts. The concepts of theogenesis and cosmogenesis appear to be of considerable interest in terms of historico-philosophical reconstruction of the conceptual issues of the Memphite theocosmogony. The author offers historical and philosophical approach to analyzing the theme of creation in this notable source of ancient Egyptian pre-philosophical thought.

The principal aim of this paper is to show that a constraint that C.D. Broad imposed on the acceptability of deductions of macroproperties which would show them to be non-emergent, viz. that they use only general laws of nature, is too strong and should be replaced by the weaker condition that the deductions be non-trivial. First, the relevant notion of generality is made more precise. I propose that a law is general iff it is applicable to a diversity of phenomena relative to what I call domain constitutive properties. In order to substantiate the claim that Broad's constraint is too strong I analyse three examples of explanations of macroproperties from robotics and the life sciences. All of them are non-trivial explanations and should thereby render the explained properties non-emergent. Finally, I briefly indicate three ways in which an explanation may be non-trivial.