Supervenience of the mental

Phenomena of one kind ‘supervene on’ phenomena of another kind just in case differences with respect to the first kind require differences with respect to the second. G.E. Moore claimed that beauty supervenes on non-aesthetic properties: if one painting is beautiful and another is not, there must be some relevant non-aesthetic difference between them. Supervenience seems to offer the possibility that a property may depend on other properties, without being explicable in terms of them. Contemporary philosophers of mind have employed the idea to capture the relation that appears to obtain between mental and physical properties.