When the founding fathers of emergentism conceived the concept of emergence in the early 20th century, their aim was to lay the foundations for a new philosophy of nature that would provide a middle way between reductive physicalism and substance dualism. From the outset, emergence took on an ontological face. It is placed at the service of a global vision of the natural world that contains things that, while ultimately dependent on a common physical basis, are also genuinely distinct from it.

By the 1930s, emergentism had fallen into disrepute, due to insurmountable metaphysical and empirical problems. Today, although emergentism has re-emerged as a live option, none of the available accounts of the notion manage to meet the original standards of the viewpoint. Debates are deadlocked, with the desired middle way increasingly appearing as an elusive fantasy.

The main aim of Olivier Sartenaer's MIS project is to break this deadlock, capitalizing on a recent and original theory of emergentism called "transformational emergentism", which constitutes a means of overcoming the problems that plagued early emergentism and still affect its contemporary progeny. More specifically, the project intends to develop an account of transformational emergence that constitutes the appropriate tool for defending an ontological form of non-reductive physicalism.

With this in mind, three specific objectives will be pursued. First, the missing history of transformational emergentism - rendered invisible by a powerful historical bias - will be written. Second, transformational emergentism will be endowed with solid metaphysical foundations in the three dimensions that define it, namely diachrony, flatness and "ontological dynamism". And thirdly, transformational emergentism will be endowed with empirical respectability, by showing that it constitutes the best framework for interpreting natural phenomena in certain areas of physics (namely the cosmology of the early universe) and biology (namely the theory of major evolutionary transitions).