ABSTRACT
Philosophy.—Two of our most deep-rooted intuitions about mental phenomena seem to conflict: on one side, mental properties depend on physical properties, but on the other, mental properties cannot be reduced to physical properties (→DUALISM/MONISM, PHYSICALISM, REDUCTIONISM). To reconcile these intuitions, philosophers of language proposed the concept of supervenience. This term goes back to the Aristoteles Latinus. It was used first in emergentist theories of evolution (→EMERGENCE) and then in moral philosophy to express the idea that moral or evaluative properties such as goodwill or courage supervene on natural properties, without being reduced to them. Donald Davidson applied the concept to the relationship between the mental and the physical, to defend the idea that no two events can be identical in every physical aspect while differing in their mental aspects. The supervenience of a set of A-properties on a set of B-properties is both a relation of determination and a nonreductive relation (asymmetrical). But can it satisfy both of these conditions?
