01 Meditation Panel Preface.indd - United Nations Day of Vesak 2013

Buddhist Philosophy and
Meditation Practice
the cerebellum (which governs voluntary muscle movement). This standard is generally associated,
in the disjunctive, with the cardiopulmonary standard according to which death ensues when lung
and heart functions terminate. That is, death is constituted when either standard is met. These criteria
were legally codied in the Uniform Determination of Death Act, adopted by most of the states of
the United States, the text of which states:
Determination of Death. An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation
of circulatory or respiratory functions or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the
entire brain, including the brainstem, is dead... 3
According to the view embodied in the Act, death is not seen as a process but rather as
an event (i.e., the instantiation of a property at a time - see Kim, 1976) or a state (i.e., the end
result of the instantiation of that property). It occurs at a moment in time, although a medical
determination must be made as to whether this state is irreversible. So a period of time may lapse
between cessation of neurophysiological function and medical determination of irreversibility.
It is worth noting that according to the Act the cessation of brain/mental function may either
be assumed or that criterion may be dispensed with altogether when heart or lung functions stop.
Thus, the Act explicitly codies the physicalist understanding that mental function is dependent upon
and determined by physical function. This relationship of dependency and determination, as we shall
discuss in detail later, is usually referred to as ‘supervenience’ in the Western Analytic tradition.
Supervenience
Physicalism is often characterized using the notion of ‘supervenience,’ a philosophical term
of art designed to provide a positive account of the relationship between mental and physical events.
In one oft-cited passage, arguing for non-reductive physicalism, Donald Davidson writes:
“Although the position I describe denies that there are psychophysical laws, it is consistent
with the view that mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on
physical characteristics.” (Davidson, 1980, p.214)
Kim (1998) suggests that, following Davidson, talk of “supervenience” quickly caught on
in philosophy of mind precisely because it appeared to offer a positive account of the relationship
between mental and physical phenomena. Subsequent literature came to be dominated by talk of
supervenience as an apparently viable statement of physicalism-without-reductionism. Davidson
elaborates on what it means for the mental to be dependent on, or determined by, the physical thus:
“Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all
physical respects but differing in some mental respects, or that an object cannot alter in
some mental respect without altering in some physical respect.” (Davidson, 1980, p. 214) 4
Davidson’s elucidation of the supervenience relationship, then, consists of two logically
3
Uniform Determination of Death Act: National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, 1981
4
It is worth noting, that, of Davidson’s two explications of the concept of supervenience here, the rst is for events,
whilst the second is for objects. It is unclear from Davidson’s somewhat elliptical comment, whether he intends this
distinction to do any philosophical work—in what follows, we shall ignore it.
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