Recent Work On Supervenience

Abstract

I discuss recent developments in the following specific areas of work on supervenience: (i) the variety of specific formulations that have been given as discriminations of the basic maxim of supervenience; (ii) questions of entailment and other relations between these formulations; (iii) supervenience and mental causation; (iv) the philosophical significance of supervenience theses. Among the suggestions that I offer are (a) that certain psychophysical supervenience claims are in harmony with a recognizably Cartesian conception of mind and (b) that the detailed debate over questions of supervenience would benefit from reflection on certain broader issues in model philosophy.