Erica Onnis is the holder of the Transdisciplinarity and Research on Complex Systems – t-co.re@AMU / Iméra Chair for the 2025-26 academic year.
Her research project at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix Marseille Université, focuses on novelty as a central feature of emergence, a concept that in the contemporary metaphysical debate has been consistently interpreted in causal terms.
Within this framework, a phenomenon is strongly emergent when it depends on its components and has some novel causal powers. The project aims to demonstrate that the causal interpretation of novelty may be fruitfully integrated with a non-causal one to have more appropriate conceptual tools to investigate emergence outside metaphysics and, specifically, in complex systems.
To learn more, view her resident page by consulting the link below
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Video transcript
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0:08 I'm Erika, I'm a philosopher, I studied at the University of Turin in Italy and now I work in Rome at Cuseno University. I work on the concept of emergence, which is a technical term that refers to the quite mysterious fact that somehow novelty appears in the world. And it happens both in nature and in social contexts. Think about new biological features appearing, new biological species or new social phenomena like political movements, trends and the appearance of social groups. And so I try to understand if all these processes that can be called emerging processes
0:46 have something in common and how can we precisely describe them. At E-Mera, I'm holding the Transdisciplinarity and Research on Complex Systems Chair. So here I'm developing a project on emergence and biological complexity. So I'm trying to understand which philosophical account of emergence is the most accurate in describing biological complex systems, which are those systems composed by many parts interacting in sophisticated and complex ways and very often showing finalised behaviour and complex behaviours. My idea is that philosophical accounts of emergence on the table that we can find in
1:24 current literature are missing something. So my contribution here will be to detect that something, describe that something, and trying to formulate a more exhaustive account of emergence able to describe biological complex systems. My account of emergence tries to define in a pluralistic way emergent novelty. So I think that the kind of novelty appearing in the world is not just causal, but is also what I suggest calling qualitative, which means having to do with structures, patterns, topologies, architectures, behaviours.
1:58 And this is something that is very important for complexity scientists, it's been kind of neglected by the philosophical community. Well, I can say that all my scientific career and also my personal interest outside academia lead me to this project because I've studied emerger for 10 years now and I've always been very interested in biological complex system, which is a fancy way to say animals and ecosystems. So I love animals, I love nature, I'm a wildlife photographer. And so I finally succeeded in unifying these two topics, emergence and biological
2:34 complexity. Given the nature of my project here at Imerat, I hope to meet biologists and complexity scientists interested in the theoretical work I'm developing. So the chair in which my fellowship is framed has many excellent partners, and so I hope and look forward to expand the interdisciplinary horizon in which I'm working and attend the many events organized by the partners, such as for instance the French chapter of the Complexity Science Society or the Centre Research Group.
