ABSTRACT
The notion of supervenience has played a prominent role in the thinking of these philosophers. To see that this is no accident we need only consider the two main desiderata that supervenience relations are meant to capture: the dependence of the supervening properties on the subvenient, or base, properties; and the irreducibility of the supervening properties. Jaegwon Kim pays particular attention to the relation of global supervenience which is thought by many to be the version of supervenience that best satisfies the two desiderata and is therefore available to nonreductive materialists. In “Concepts of Supervenience”, Kim provides what he takes to be a proof of the equivalence of strong and global supervenience. Kim’s arguments can be treated adequately without considering the nature of dependence in any detail.
