Emergence and Supervenience

Abstract

The metaphysical relation of supervenience has seen most of its service in the fields of the philosophy of mind and ethics. Although not repaying all of the hopes some initially invested in it—the mind-body problem remains stubbornly unsolved, ethics and aesthetics not satisfactorily naturalized—the use of the notion of supervenience has certainly clarified the nature and the commitments of so-called non-reductive physicalism, especially with regard to the questions of whether explanations of supervenience relations are required and whether such explanations must amount to a kind of reduction (a good discussion of these issues can be found in Kim 2005).