ABSTRACT
The concept of supervenience has been employed for a variety of purposes in philosophy, a rather dominant tendency since the early 1970’s has been to invoke it in efforts to articulate a broadly materialistic, or physicalistic, position in philosophy of mind or in metaphysics generally. British emergentism will be instructive to begin by considering supervenience in relation to an account of the special sciences that has been dubbed “British emergentism” in a splendid and fascinating paper, McLaughlin. The British emergentists were not substance-dualists; they held that all particulars are physical entities wholly constituted out of physical entities as their parts. But they were not full-fledged materialists either, because they denied that physics is a causally complete science. The term “supervenient” was employed by Morgan in contexts where synchronic inter-level relations among properties were under consideration.
