EMERGENCE AND HUMAN UNIQUENESS: LIMITING OR DELIMITING EVOLUTIONARY EXPLANATION?

Abstract. Philip Clayton's book Mind and Emergence presents a highly sophisticated argument against any kind of uncritical theology that might want to follow science into a world of overly narrow, compartmentalized disciplines that do not sufficiently communicate between themselves. Clayton argues persuasively that the basic structure of the phenomenal world is multileveled, with emergent properties and degrees of freedom that cannot be adequately described, predicted, or explained in terms of lower‐level phenomena only. Moreover, the various levels of organization are linked to one another by interfaces of mutual constraint in terms of upward and downward causation. The most valuable part of Clayton's argument, however, is that in a philosophy of emergence one must also, if not especially, account for the role of the biological sciences and especially for the influence of human thoughts and skills, human choices and actions, and—one of the most important causes of all—human purposes. Clayton's biggest challenge is that the level of human personhood offers us the only appropriate level to introduce the question of God and the possibility of divine agency. I critically evaluate this central claim and its implications not only for the extent of divine influence on the world but also for the scope and limitations of the interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and the sciences.     

BETWEEN LIBERATION(S) AND OCCUPATION(S): RECONSIDERING THE EMERGENCE OF MAGHREBI JEWISH COMMUNISM, 1942–1945

From the fall of France in 1940 to the Anglo-American liberation of North Africa from Vichy rule (in Morocco and Algeria) and German occupation (in Tunisia), from November 1942 to May 1943, the Second World War profoundly transformed North African youth. For young French-educated Jews living in urban colonial spaces, disillusionment with Vichy France's betrayal of democracy and equality led them to a search for new political models, including Communism.

Through the memoirs of three North African Jews that came to politics through local Communist parties, Abraham Serfaty, Daniel Timsit and Gilbert Naccache, Communism in its wartime form (allied with Western democracies) provided an ideal mediating force. For a generation that wanted to fight against the anti-Jewish measures of the Vichy and Nazi regimes, as well as to abolish colonial distinctions between indigenous Jews and Muslims and Europeans, Communism proposed radical equality in a supra-national framework. As the authors/activists look back on the failures of decolonization, they attempt to make sense of their political commitments by gesturing to a utopian moment when Jews could be grounded in local struggles while looking to the US, the Soviet Union, and Popular Front France as models for equality.