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supervenience

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supervenience

In philosophy, the asymmetrical relation of ontological dependence that holds between two generically different sets of properties (e.g., mental and physical properties) if and only if every change in an object's properties belonging to the first set—the supervening properties—entails and is due to a change in properties belonging to the second set (the base properties). Supervenience has often been appealed to by philosophers who want to uphold physicalism while rejecting the identity theory: Though it may be impossible to identify mental properties with physical properties in a one-to-one fashion, mental properties may still supervene on, and thus be grounded in, physical properties. Thus, no two things that are physically alike can be mentally (or psychologically) different, and a being's mental properties will be determined by its physical ones.



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The final section deals with metaphysics and science and includes chapters on absolute and relational space; infinity and metaphysics; the passage of time; the direction of time; causation; laws and dispositions; determinism and probability; essences and natural kinds; metaphysics and relativity; metaphysics and quantum physics; supervenience, reduction, and emergence; biometaphysics; social entities; the mental and the physical; and the self.
Supervenience and the downward efficacy of the mental: A nonreductive physicalist account of human action.
Contending that there are remarkable affinities between some late medieval theories of mind and contemporary philosophy of mind, Pluta begins the essay with a discussion of a medieval anticipation of neural networks found in a rather obscure fifteenth-century manuscript drawing of the brain, and then ends with an surprising argument for a parallel between Nicholas's thought and contemporary supervenience theory.
 
 
 
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