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Article: Supervenience
- Article from:
- Encyclopedia of Science and Religion
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Supervenience
Ever since Donald Davidson introduced the notion of supervenience within the philosophy of mind in 1970, it has come to play a key role in philosophical discussions regarding reducibility and the ontological structure of the world in general. With its help, philosophers of mind, in particular, hoped to solve the question of whether a nonreductive kind of materialism could be upheld that would avoid the pitfalls of traditional dualism on the one hand and of traditional materialism on the other. The key attraction of supervenience was that it seemed to deliver dependence without reduction. Events at higher levels of reality could thus be seen as totally determined by ...