Supervenience in the context of "David Lewis (philosopher)"

In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism and enactivism, in the mind–body problem.

Aristotle shared Plato's view of multiple souls and further elaborated a hierarchical arrangement, corresponding to the distinctive functions of plants, animals, and humans: a nutritive soul of growth and metabolism that all three share; a perceptive soul of pain, pleasure, and desire that only humans and other animals share; and the faculty of reason that is unique to humans only. In this view, a soul is the hylomorphic form of a viable organism, wherein each level of the hierarchy formally supervenes upon the substance of the preceding level. For Aristotle, the first two souls, based on the body, perish when the living organism dies, whereas there remains an immortal and perpetual intellective part of mind. For Plato, however, the soul was not dependent on the physical body; he believed in metempsychosis, the migration of the soul to a new physical body. It has been considered a form of reductionism by some philosophers, since it enables the tendency to ignore very big groups of variables by its assumed association with the mind or the body, and not for its real value when it comes to explaining or predicting a studied phenomenon.

A chemical property is any of a material's properties that becomes evident during, or after, a chemical reaction; that is, any attribute that can be established only by changing a substance's chemical identity. Simply speaking, chemical properties cannot be determined just by viewing or touching the substance; the substance's internal structure must be affected greatly for its chemical properties to be investigated. When a substance goes under a chemical reaction, the properties will change drastically, resulting in chemical change. However, a catalytic property would also be a chemical property.

Chemical properties can be contrasted with physical properties, which can be discerned without changing the substance's structure. However, for many properties within the scope of physical chemistry, and other disciplines at the boundary between chemistry and physics, the distinction may be a matter of researcher's perspective. Material properties, both physical and chemical, can be viewed as supervenient; i.e., secondary to the underlying reality. Several layers of superveniency are possible.

In philosophy (metaphysics), physicalism or physical logicism is the view that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. It is opposed to idealism, according to which the world arises from the mind. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality, unlike "two-substance" (mind–body dualism) or "many-substance" (pluralism) views. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated. Physicalism is often treated as equivalent to naturalism but there are important distinctions between them.

Physicalism is closely related to materialism, and has evolved from materialism with advancements in the physical sciences in explaining observed phenomena. The terms "physicalism" and "materialism" are often used interchangeably, but can be distinguished on the basis that physics describes more than just matter. Physicalism encompasses matter, but also energy, physical laws, space, time, spacetime, exotic matter, structure, physical processes, information, state, and forces, among other things, as described by physics and other sciences, all within a monistic framework.

Property dualism describes a category of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that, although the world is composed of just one kind of substance—the physical kind—there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties. In other words, it is the view that at least some non-physical, mental properties (such as thoughts, imagination and memories) exist in, or naturally supervene upon, certain physical substances (namely brains).

Substance dualism, on the other hand, is the view that there exist in the universe two fundamentally different kinds of substance: physical (matter) and non-physical (mind or consciousness), and subsequently also two kinds of properties which inhere in those respective substances. Both substance and property dualism are opposed to reductive physicalism. Notable proponents of property dualism include David Chalmers, Christof Koch, and Richard Fumerton. It became prominent in the final decades of the twentieth century and is now the leading alternative to physicalism.