Supervenience‐based Formulations of Physicalism*

Filling in the schema requires specifying what it is for an entity to be physical, and what it is for an entity to be ‘‘nothing over and above’’ some other entities. Some have worried that no account of the physical is adequate for physicalist purposes; and I’ll soon say a bit about how physicalists have responded (in my view, successfully) to this worry. But my main focus here is on nothing over and aboveness, and specifically on whether any supervenience-based approaches to characterizing this notion can enter into viably formulating physicalism. Supervenience-based accounts of nothing over and aboveness also instantiate a schema: