An Analysis Of The Concept Of "Supervenience"

In recent years, with the rise of studing Metaphysics and the polularity of discussing the Philosophy of Mind in Anglo-American philosophy, Supervenience has been one of most important concepts. Meanwhile, the characteristics of subject-neutral superveniece has make it in other disciplines (such as ethics,aesthetics and systems science) also widely favored. Because of this, varieties of supervenience have been distinguished, their pairwise logical relationships examined, and their usefulness for various purposes scrutinized. However, despite extensive analysis, some details are askew, some controversies unresolved. The key of controversies lies in, whether to establish a real dialogue context makes the discussion in the same standard and same premise, thus it can be seen, a clear and appropriate concept of supervenience is the key to solving the problem. I will by no means attempt to straighten out all the details or to settle all the controversies, while just sort out the most important parts on previous work, so as to obtain a clear concept of supervenience.This paper falls into three respects to analyze the concept of supervenience. The first part compares and analyzes the two relatum (properties and events) of supervenience relation, finally find out that the former (properties) is the main relata; The second part sorts out two ways of classification , one way of classificaton is weak, strong and global supervenience, which seems fine, but it is too complex and there are many problems. While another way of classification is one vs. one, one vs. many, many vs. one, many vs. many sorted by mathematical concept of"correspondence", which is not yet perfect, but it is still very promising; The last part tries to show what is the nature of supervenience relation, according to the primary relationships.